Download Dragon Speaking Naturally Free
Vernell Steakley
Dragon NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal user interface. As an example, dictated words appear in a floating tooltip as they are spoken (though there is an option to suppress this display to increase speed), and when the speaker pauses, the program transcribes the words into the active window at the location of the cursor. (Dragon does not support dictating to background windows.) The software has three primary areas of functionality: voice recognition in dictation with speech transcribed as written text, recognition of spoken commands, and text-to-speech: speaking text content of a document. Voice profiles can be accessed by different computers in a networked environment, although the audio hardware and configuration must be identical to those of the machine generating the configuration. The Professional version allows creation of custom commands to control programs or functions not built into NaturallySpeaking.
I was actually impressed with the software because John was just talking naturally and then every now and then Dragon Naturally Speaking would just spit out the entire sentence and it was pretty close to what John said.
I have an intel imac with 2 Ghz duo core 2, 1GB RAM. Naturally speaking 8 has always worked in Boot Camp (Win XP, SP2), and quite well at that. I use a Plantronics USB headset. It never worked right with the Parallels trial that I tried. Fusion B4, using the Boot Camp partition worked great. Better still, I have been running it in a new VM (again, XP), and have to say it works very well. For what its worth, I can even play streaming audio or iTunes in OSX through the speakers, while AT THE SAME TIME dictating and playing back my dictation through the USB headset, obviously with Dragon in the VM. I copied/imported my speech files from the Boot Camp partition into the VM. It works very well. I dictate and edit 45-100 page documents into WordPerfect 10, now in a Fusion VM.
OK. I finally got this thing to work. Just a recap. I have a 24"iMac 2.16 ghz intel duo core processor with 2gb RAM (1gb to the Mac and 1gb to Fusion). I am running Leopard 10.5.1 (the new update released last week) and have installed Fusion 1.1 and am running Win XP Pro w/ SP2. I have put dragon naturally speaking (DNS) on and loaded all of my voabulaires from the PC I use it on at my office. I am a physician and we use DNS to transcribe our dictations into a electronic medical record. I have tested a Phillips Speechmike Pro II USB microphone and a Logitech desktop USB microphone and both work great. In fact, with the Phillips Speechmike Pro II, I have even gotten the "Function keys" - specifically the record button - programmed to turn the microphone on and off.
Here is what I did. BEFORE starting the VM, plug in vwhichever USB device you are going to use. Next, in OS X, click system preferences, then sound, then input, and then click the USB device you have plugged in. This now tells the MAC that the USB device will be the audio input for the CPU. Now start the VM. Once it is up and running, along the bottom right of the VM screen you will see some USB symbols next to the CD symbol. Put the mouse pointer over the USB symbols and it will tell you what is connected to each one. When you find the symbol that has your microphone device connected, click the USB symbol and then click "Connect". This now tells the VM to use this device for audio input. That is it. You are now ready to use the microphone and DNS.
2. Always backup your Dragon speaking settings and environment. I've seen situations whereby your OS gets hosed and all the saved information Dragon naturally speaking has learnt from you is gone. Also if you change mic's be prepared to get Dragon to re-learn.
The more you use Dragon, correcting its errors and adding your own lingo to its vocabulary, the better it gets. It already recognizes everything from "a cappella" to "smiley-face" to "ZZ Top." Abbreviations and tech slang work, too; speaking "dot ASP" spells ".ASP" and saying "smiley-face" will spell out this character: :-) Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 has the intelligence to detect words within context. For example, it knows to type "eating a carrot" instead of "eating a karat."
You should only buy this program if you want to be angry all the time. The ridiculous number of idiosyncrasies to this program are unreal. The new one is that I can be speaking a line of text and realize that what I said was not exactly inputted correctly. I go to fix that spot, then put the cursor back to where the next sentence begins, but every time I begin my dictation it returns to the spot where I made the correction. This will happen 10 times in a row until I finally have to shut the program off.
This thing has some benefits, but you have to expect a lot of crap to get work done.