Has anyone used Dragon Naturally Speaking lately?

[kestrell]

I have a friend who is investigating the possibility of trying it, but I can't say how long it takes to train the software: an hour? hours? days? I have heard that this process is much easier in recent years, and I am wondering how easy is it for someone who is not a tech-saavy geek type.

Does anyone have any experience to share? Also, the person is sighted, so there's no need to worry about having to use it with Jaws.

Comments

[rinue]

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.