So much for voice recognition software. It cost me $200 to learn that Dragon Naturally Speaking is NOT going to suit my needs, in addition to being a royal pain to install and deal with. I wanted to try to use it to transcribe our church’s sermons for the website; it has a nifty feature where you can load an audio file to be transcribed. Result: sermon mad libs. But I don’t really hold that against the software; after all, my pastor didn’t undergo the setup process. I did, however.
Here’s a sample of how Dragon NaturallySpeaking translates my words I spent about half an hour going through the training and it’s reasonably accurate but still requires a fair amount of correction — at least more than I like. I’m very unlikely to use voice for blog post and the fact that whether it’s a problem with my speech or whether it’s a problem with the software the fact that it doesn’t hear oral floral floral [finally had to type in PLURAL] for things like hosts strike that posts every time is really annoying. I’ll end up spending as long correcting as I would just typing out to begin with. It’s certainly not going to work for code. I might’ve had a better experience with the software is that it installed from the box the way you expect after dropping two bills on something. Unfortunately there was a problem with C++ and I ended up having to you contact support and download an entire copy of the software. So I finally got it to run only now I can’t go through the tutorial on how to use it because it doesn’t support my version of flash. I have the latest version but that’s evidently not good enough. Additionally I have to speak very slowly to make this work. With time it would probably work better but after all this aggravation it’s not worth it to me to find out.
A trial version would simplified this process a lot. If something is this much of a pain to install and deal with, it’s probably not worth investing any money in. I’m hoping to successfully return the software and get my money back. Office Depot, where I bought it, absolutely will not take it back. But Nuance, the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking, may. I’ve put in a request and it’s being processed. So, bottom line – $200 cash, and about $400 worth of my time. VERY annoying.
