Product Reviews

Speech recognition was once the holy grail of modern computing, but for one reason or another it didn't catch on. As a result the number of companies producing the software has slowly dwindled. Now, aside from Microsoft Windows XP's and Vista's built-in speech recognition, the only big name left is Nuance.

With such a limited choice, it's just as well that Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 is a massive improvement over the speech recognition tools in Windows XP and Vista. One of the major bugbears with voice recognition has been the amount of time it takes to train the software to the idiosyncrasies of your voice. Doing this in XP or Vista takes an age, but with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, as with version 9, you don't have to train it at all.

In fact, once you've done a couple of microphone volume and quality checks, you can get started straight away. We found that its accuracy was good from the start, and the more time you spend with Dragon, the more accurate it becomes. The software monitors the corrections you make as you go, training itself in the process. You can also ask it to rummage through your emails and documents to optimise its vocabulary to your writing style.

The software is very quick, with words popping up onscreen in a matter of seconds. Such responsiveness means that dictating at speeds faster than you can type is a very real possibility. NaturallySpeaking is much more accurate than Vista's tool, too, and a lot easier to get started with.

Dictating plain text isn't much use unless you can correct and format it quickly and easily. To this end Nuance

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has added several useful tools in this version. Word selection and operations are much more intuitive. Rather than saying "delete the third word from the left", for instance, you simply say "delete surprisingly", or "bold that" to change the format of the previous word.

There are new help tools as well. Say "what can I say", and a window appears on the screen with a list of commands that you can use with the current application. This is context-sensitive and changes as you move from program to program - a very useful quick reference that you'll find yourself using a lot.

NaturallySpeaking also adds several useful voice short cuts for working with web browsers. Tell it to "search the web for Computer Shopper", for example, and it will launch a web browser and search Google for you. Once you've found what you're looking for, browsing pages is surprisingly easy. You can activate a link just by saying it out loud, and move quickly up and down pages with a simple "page up" or "page down". This works reliably only with plain HTML, however, and we had problems navigating more complex, AJAX-based sites such as Gmail. In our tests only a few of the links were clickable.

There are plenty of other features to play with. The standard version of NaturallySpeaking has a command set tailored to Microsoft Word, which makes accessing even obscure menu items quick and easy. In Vista, you can even say "Start menu", and instantly search for and launch applications. For programs where Dragon doesn't recognise the buttons onscreen, various mouse-control commands are available that allow you to move the cursor around the screen and click on items. If that doesn't work, Dragon also recognises keystrokes. For example, saying "Press Control S" will save your document.

Of course, Vista's built-in tool can do all this, and in some respects it works just as well, such as when controlling applications and windows, for example. For dictation accuracy, though, Dragon is unmatched. It won't replace a keyboard entirely - correction and formatting is still not the quickest or most intuitive process - but for those who really need it, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 is a great deal.