After retiring (from a career as a scientist), I took a job as a technical writer. My technical background and my interest in writing are good matches for this job, but the fact that I never became a touch typist proved to be a significant liability, especially since I record my thoughts while referring to source material. For this reason, I turned to voice recognition software. After surveying the voice-recognition software that was available, I purchased Dragon Naturally Speaking version 7. My computer was relatively new at the time and featured a 2 GHz processor, Audigy sound card, USB2 ports, and 512 MB of RAM, so I was comfortable with its ability to efficiently run the software. I have used this program for about six months, and the results are decidedly mixed.
Despite having gone through the recommended training program, I find that the software continues to make a significant number of errors. The errors are never typos, and thus detected by one's spelling checker; they are errors of word selection, and thus careful editing is a must. Many of the errors are ones that you would expect - for example, "an" or "in" for "and" - but in some instances the choice of word by the software is so bizarre that if I do not catch it immediately, it is not apparent to me later, even from context, exactly what word I intended, which sends me back to the source material, and that of course takes time. Good enunciation and optimal positioning of the microphone are, of course, important. But I have found some words that the software missed by a mile no matter how carefully I enunciated or positioned the microphone. I have also found that some words that I asked the software to select and correct continued to be misinterpreted, suggesting that the software does not always learn from the corrections. So while dictation is easier than typing, editing for the inevitable errors results in dictation being no faster than had I typed it myself. I should point out that I have always dictated to DragonPad, where accuracy is supposed to be highest, and then cut and pasted into Word. One problem that I have noted with DragonPad is the apparent absence of an autosave feature, and I have lost material on occasion as a result.
In surveying voice-recognition software, I noted the evaluations of microphones of several websites that dealt with voice recognition. As a result, I purchased a Sennheiser ME3 USB microphone, which was top-rated by one of the websites. Before making the purchase, I debated whether to buy a high-end microphone or a digital recorder. I settled on the microphone because of my inexperience using digital recorders for dictation and because of their cost. In retrospect, I wish I had purchased a digital recorder because of the freedom it provides: one must be at one's computer to use a microphone, and this I have found to be more inconvenient than anticipated.
Based on my experience, this software makes the job of getting one's thoughts on paper easier but not necessarily faster than had one gone to the trouble of typing them. And woe to the person who fails to carefully edit what this software records. Does version 8 represent a significant improvement over version 7? At this point, I'm not prepared to pay to find out.
W. Evans
Old-and-Wise