Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Premium

Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 Premium the best version yet of the popular speech recognition software? Read our review to find out if it really is an alternative to bashing away at a keyboard.

Speech recognition software can be a godsend for sufferers of repetitive strain injury, the disabled as well as for people who just aren't very good at typing. Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking is the most well-known and most popular speech-to-text program and it has a long history.

It's fair to say that only in recent years have computer processors become powerful enough to enable it to deliver on its potential. This has certainly been the experience of this writer’s regular work with a number of previous Naturally Speaking versions going back several years.

Nuance claims Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 Premium has a 15 percent improvement in accuracy over the previous version. That’s a bold and slightly perplexing claim since version 10 appeared (about a year ago) with a 99 percent accuracy claim.

There are other claimed improvements, too. Naturally Speaking 11 Premium is supposedly more accurate from the very start, requiring less training and delivering greater productivity in those all-important early stages of use. We installed it on a laptop with a fresh install of Windows in order to test this, and have to say we were impressed.

The software needs some basic information before you start working with it. It needs to know what region of the world you live in and any accent you might speak with, as well as your age bracket. This basic data gives it a few pointers to help it understand your voice. As part of the short induction process, you have to read out a few sample sentences to further train the software to your voice.

You also need to calbrate your headset during setup. Naturally Speaking 11 Premium is available bundled with a wired headset. It’s a fairly low end but perfectly acceptable over-the-head, adjustable headset with a hinged microphone. It's the headset we used to test the software with. It's perfectly serviceable, but you should be able to use any existing headsets that you may already have. Nuance maintains a non-comprehensive list of headsets it has tested for compatibility.

The setup process takes under a quarter of an hour. With that completed, you can let the software scan your My Documents folder so it can analyse your writing style and also pick up commonly typed bits of information such as the email addresses you use, to help it improve the accuracy of its speech recognition. How long that takes will vary depending on in the size of your My Documents folder. If, like us, you have a lot of content in that folder produced by other people, it might be worth skipping that part of the process as we did.

Accuracy was surprisingly good, and we really like the way you can make corrections. Simply saying ‘correct’ and what has been incorrectly transcribed, or saying ‘correct that’ calls up a menu from which you can choose the words to be corrected, spelling out the correct words, convert lower case text into capital letters, or simply type over the incorrectly transcribed text to teach the program what it should have done.

There are plenty of other voice commands you can use too. These go beyond mere dictation and aren't available in the cheaper Home edition of the software. They show how Naturally Speaking 11 Premium interacts with a range of applications. Saying ‘Search the web for IT Pro’ will open your browser and complete that task. Saying ‘Search email for Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 Premium review’ will do precisely what you'd expect.