Speech Recognition Software

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the leading speech recognition software, recommended by health professionals. You can dictate text and commands for it to type and the Premium version will also read text, emails etc to you.

It is feature rich allowing the user to train the software to better understand your accent and way of speaking. You can teach it shortcuts that it knows means a whole paragraph of text if you want to.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11

Dragon NaturallySpeaking comes in a variety of packages, most of which include a noise-cancelling headset, wired or wireless, or a dictation machine.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred v10 from Nuance

For ergonomic purposes any noise cancelling headset is good although a wireless headset means that you can get up and walk around as you talk to your computer or listen to your computer talking to you. That is a particular benefit if you are suffering from neck pain or RSI conditions that are exacerbated by sitting in one position for a period of time.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium has text to speech functionality which comes with different voices and you can alter the reading speed. You can be listening to emails as you do your filing, make a fresh cup of tea or whatever you want to do!

Dragon NaturallySpeaking's feature-list

Create documents, reports and emails three times faster than most people type. Up to 99% accuracy - correct any recognition errors and the software updates your profile to enable better recognition accuracy.

Dictate directly into most Microsoft Office applications. Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and AOL also supported. Navigate the desktop by voice: launch or switch applications, save or print documents all by voice. Add Custom Words and Voice Commands such as insert signature, and pre-set text and images will automatically appear in email and documents.

Easy Correction and Proofing. Users can listen back to their dictation.

NEW Quick Voice Formatting to make editing and formatting text faster than ever.

NEW Dragon Voice Shortcuts for Web Search make searching for information on the Web faster and easier. Just say Search maps for Italian restaurants in London, England, and Dragon will enter the term in the search field and return the results.

NEW Dragon Voice Shortcuts for Desktop Search allows users to quickly locate information on the PC.

Be Productive on the Go. Dictate into any Nuance-certified digital recorder for automatic transcription when it’s synched with a PC.

Quick installation, no special script reading required. High-quality headset included.

Are there any alternatives?

The best answer is "it depends how much typing or reading text you do!". Dragon NaturallySpeaking is currently the market leader and with good reason. If you're not a full time computer user and affordability is an issue a cheaper alternative, if you're on Windows-7, might be Windows 7's built-in speech recognition.

It is sufficient to be able to dictate speech to text but it is more limited in both its options and customisation ability for the individual and it doesn't read text back to you.

If you want the computer to read text back to you you can try SpeakComputer which is freeware.

These options can be appropriate but they don't currently represent the complete solution that Dragon NaturallySpeaking does.