I have used it recently. How long it takes to train depends on how thoroughly you want to train it. If you read all the training texts, it takes somewhere between 8 and 11 hours, but recognition was pretty good after just one hour. The big problem I had was that it held a pretty big buffer of words for content recognition, so what it was writing was always several sentences behind what I was saying, and I had trouble correcting on the fly. Overall, I was pretty impressed.