Content area
Full text
First Look: Voice Rec Gets BetterDragon NaturallySpeaking 8 works well as a dictation tool, but its PC controls are still limited.Liane Cassavoy, PC World
I'm writing this article without ever touching my keyboard. No, I don't have magical powers; I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 Preferred, ScanSoft's speech recognition software. The $200 application is designed to work as both a dictation tool and a means of controlling your computer by voice. My tests of a shipping version found it notably more accomplished at one task than the other.
After a brief training period with the app and its included microphone headset (which took about 5 minutes), I was ready to start talking. I found it fairly impressive right from the start. It did make mistakes, often on words that sound alike (for example, when I just said "a second," NaturallySpeaking recognized it as "the Sicilian"). The precision did improve when I took the time to go through more training--although I never...