Unfortunately, there are people who have had a bad experience using Dragon
NaturallySpeaking. Possibly you are one such person or know someone who
has had a bad experience. There are many issues involved here and so I
would like to discuss a few of them on this page.
Recently I was training one of my clients. My client told me that she knew someone who had used Dragon NaturallySpeaking previously; someone
who had tried it for a while and then gave up using it. Because of this
story my client was apprehensive about whether Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Professional 9 would really work for her or
not.
I assured her that with the training she was receiving she would
greatly benefit from using "NatSpeak", as some people like to
call it. While working with NatSpeak on her own she experienced some errors that repeated often and
this frustrated her. In a succeeding training session I learned of the
repeating errors and showed her how to resolve the problem using the Vocabulary Editor built
into Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Seeing this work so well gave her more
confidence. I also continued to work with her to help her learn to
correct properly. Correcting properly is essential for resolving
recognition errors and helping the program to "learn" and not repeat
errors.
Because my client works with a lot of medical terminology her
employer soon upgraded her to the Medical
Suite which greatly improved her recognition accuracy.
She also took my advice to have her employer purchase a Philips
SpeechMike. This microphone helped her to relax and her
accuracy continued to improve.
Recently, I was speaking with her and she told me that she uses
the program constantly now. It has become her regular source of word
processing input. She loves the Dragon
Medical Suite and raves about the Philips
SpeechMike too.
My client's friend who had given up using Dragon NaturallySpeaking had
never received training and was instead given a "sink or swim"
situation. She "sank" because she became frustrated and did not
have the training to help her resolve the efficiency issues. Though there
are people who are able to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking on their own they
likely will not make use of such fundamental features as Vocabulary Editor and
how to correct properly. They won't know about Sample Commands,
which provides a very helpful list of commands one can use.
Too often Dragon NaturallySpeaking is used as an experimental
toy rather than an efficiency tool. The difference comes down to
training.
CompuTALK offers personal training, both in person, and over the
Internet. In addition, we provide an inexpensive training solution through
the SpeakEASY DVD.
This complete training program is a great way to get started on the right
path. But as a caution, CompuTALK does not recommend that a new user rely upon
the training DVD as their sole source of training. CompuTALK strongly
recommends that people invest two or more hours of personal training to be sure
to get started correctly and using the program properly.
