As in the past, asking 'what can I say' calls up help with voice commands. The familiar Dragon Bar floating toolbar provides the key point of entry to Dragon Professional Individual v15, and all of its menus and options are, of course, accessible by voice. The floating Dragon Bar toolbar is the main point of entry to Dragon Professional's functionality. Dragon now recognises what I mean by 'a quarter to three', and will translate this into '2:45' it also knows that 'seven pounds ten' means '£7.10' while 'seven pounds ten ounces' means '7 lbs 10 oz'. One I found immediately useful is better time formatting. There are many small tweaks that users will likely discover over time.
I work in a quiet home office, and so couldn't test that in the most challenging conditions, but the software didn't seem bothered by having music playing in the background. Anyone using Dragon in an environment with others around, such as a work cubicle, will likely find this a boon. Nuance says this new edition of Dragon has improved ability to 'listen' in slightly noisy environments. So, for example, saying 'basic letterhead' could type out a proforma letter and put the cursor where you want to start dictating.
You can use a headset or a laptop's built-in microphone, although you have to switch between inputs manually.Īs well as converting speech to text word by word, users can add custom commands that are effectively macros for entering huge screeds of text as a response to short vocal commands. I'd like Dragon to automatically know whether a headset is installed, and make the switch for itself. Still, it's a hassle switching between inputs, which needs to be done manually by selecting Manage Dictation Sources from the Profile menu. I alternated between a Plantronics Voyager 5200 UC and my laptop's built-in microphone, both of which allowed me to enter text quicker than by typing - and I'm a pretty fast touch typist. Setup is straightforward, and includes a short text that you read so the software can adapt to your voice and audio environment.įrom a fresh installation, and without any training or opportunities to analyse older texts I'd written, Dragon v15 was remarkably accurate.
In fact, it seemed to take longer to remove the old version of this application than it did to install and setup the new one. You read a short text to calibrate your microphone and wait briefly while background tweaks are made to the software, but all this takes a matter of minutes. Installation & setup Top ZDNET ReviewsĪfter installing Dragon, setup is about as minimal as it gets. Again, I've not yet been able to test this in great detail, and it will be interesting to see how well Dragon fares next time I have a streaming cold. Running with a completely fresh install for this review, I've not really had a chance to see how that pans out.ĭragon can also learn about speech patterns by 'listening to' how words are spoken by an individual in each session, quickly making adjustments if it thinks the user is in a different environment with new ambient sounds, or has a cold, for example. Meanwhile, its Accuracy Tuning module can analyse corrections to learn what users really meant to say. Nuance says Dragon can look at previously created texts and learn about how individuals construct sentences, to better second-guess their speech patterns. That's down, in part, to the incorporation of deep learning. Still, there's always room for improvement, and Nuance claims there is an accuracy boost of up to 15 percent in this new version. Computing muscle is not a problem today - last year's version of Dragon Professional Individual was fast and accurate enough for speech-to-text to become part of my daily workflow, for example.
I have used Dragon products for many years - way before their acquisition by Nuance, and way before computers could really deliver the processing power that speech recognition requires. However, Nuance's credentials are not to be sniffed at - the company provides the speech recognition engine for Apple's Siri, for example. New features designed to improve accuracy include deep learning, while the user interface now takes account of touchscreen-equipped devices.įor those of us who use computers as a part of our everyday lives, speech-to-text conversion seems to be something of an acquired taste.
Dragon Professional Individual v15 is the latest update to Nuance's speech-to-text application.