Review: Nuance Communications Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 11

Computing has more than its fair share of holy grails remaining to be found—the two-pound laptop, mouse pointer control by thought alone, crash-proof Windows—but perhaps the biggest of all is the idea of using our voices to free us from the keyboard.

Nuance has been plugging away at that goal since 1994, but in nearly 20 years of research and development, voice recognition software remains a niche product favored primarily by doctors, lawyers, and other people who do lots of dictation.

Why the holdup? A lack of computing power has been a big reason why dictation software has never taken off, and it's also been seen as complex, expensive, and inaccurate.

Now Nuance is back with the 11th version of the flagship dictation software product on the market: Dragon NaturallySpeaking. And Nuance has worked to address all of these issues with this release.

If nothing else, concerns about Dragon's accuracy issues are now completely resolved. In my testing Dragon never tripped up on words except for proper names and the (very) occasional homophone. Take proper names out of the equation and accuracy is functionally 100%. Training is simple — setup with all optional steps takes about an hour, only four minutes of which is actual dictation training — and the software is reasonably easy to use. Unless you start delving into using voice to complete Windows commands (Dragon can do virtually everything in Windows by voice), you rarely, if ever, need to delve into the program's menus or help features.

Other improvements include better support for younger speakers (whose voices pitch higher) and accented speech—including British, Southern US, and "Inland Northern US" speakers—as well as the ability to correct multiple instances of an incorrect word, and the much desired feature whereby if you correct a word by typing over it, Dragon includes that correction in its training going forward. You can also tell Dragon to forget certain words out of its dictionary if, for example, it keeps transcribing "Susanne" as "Suzanne."

The only real problem with NaturallySpeaking is the same problem that his affected it since the beginning: It sounds paradoxical, but it takes a lot of mental retraining to dictate instead of type. After 20 or 30 years, we've taught our brains to think as weu tap out letters with our hands. The physical act of typing has become part of the creative process. Take your hands off the keyboard and you might find that you don't quite know what to do. Dictation simply isn't something many of us have a talent for. Yes, you can learn it, but it takes lots of time and even more patience.