People with physical disabilities will likely use speech recognition for the rest of their lives. In that circumstance it makes sense to invest in the program that will help them be the most productive and efficient.
Depending on the severity of the disability some people would require the Professional version in order to fully control the computer. But anyone who needs to reduce stress to their limbs will greatly benefit from Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional’s ability to voice control most any computer action.
The single most predominant benefit for using Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional is its ability to be customized through macros. Any action that can be done with the keyboard can be reproduced with a macro. Fortunately thousands of custom macros have been produced into a set. The CompuTALK Custom Macros are $195 for the set. Here are more examples of the CompuTALK macro set.
Using the CompuTALK macros gives a giant boost toward enabling people to use the computer hands-free. The CompuTALK macros is a set of preprogrammed commands that help people work faster. The easier-to-remember commands are also a giant step toward helping people overcome frustration with using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
The Professional Edition gives users the full capability of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The additional features are tools that solve problems and improve efficiency.
The Professional, Medical and Legal Suites also come with these features:
- Delayed Editing. This feature will save the audio with the text file. One may edit later or have support staff do the editing. This is a huge time savings. No longer do people need to do all their own editing. Just dictate the text and have the support staff review the document and edit it right in Microsoft Word!
- Use of Multiple Vocabularies. A user could have one vocabulary designed for medicine and another vocabulary for personal use. A single user could also have various-sized vocabularies.
- Roaming User. This allows users to keep their user profile updated from any networked computer. The profile could be on a network drive or a single computer’s drive that is accessible to the other computers.
- Custom Macros. Though it is mentioned above, I must stress again the importance of custom macros. These macros are easier to remember and they solve problems. This is the main feature that helps people use Dragon NaturallySpeaking with success and satisfaction.
- Specialty Vocabularies for Legal and Medical Suites. These vocabularies are optimized for their specialties. Accuracy is everything. The right vocabulary will do the best job.
©2007 Jim Bendewald
CompuTALK
History of Dragon NaturallySpeaking
Jim Bendewald, the owner of CompuTALK has been supporting, and delivering Dragon NaturallySpeaking products since 1996. In those early years the primary market was with those with disabilities. Dragon allowed the physically disabled to not only dictate text but also control and navigate about the computer. In the early years leading up to 1997 the dictation was done as “discrete speech”, meaning dictating — one — word — at — a — time. It was pretty slow and inaccurate but for those who really needed it, the program was the great equalizer enabling the disabled to go back to work and lead more productive lives. As computers got faster the software got better. In 1997 continuous speech recognition was introduced. It won numerous awards and was expected to quickly change the way people worked on their computers.
Version 2 came with the Deluxe Edition including custom macros.
Though version 1 of the Dragon NaturallySpeaking program was vastly more accurate and faster than Dragon Dictate (discrete speech) it was limited in its use. It was not able to be customized with macros, a hallmark of the Dragon software. It had limited vocabulary and the computers it ran on were still very slow compared to today’s standards. Fast forward 13 years to 2010 and we now have version 10 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. We now have computers with dual and quad cores, running much more RAM than computer users in 1997 even dreamed of having on their hard drive much less for RAM!
So it is a different world today. With version 10 there are a variety of versions to choose from. There is medical with its many specialty vocabularies for the various medical fields. There is legal which also offers the legal specialty vocabulary and the ability to dictate legal citations. There is professional whose features are also part of the Medical and Legal versions. Professional is for anyone who is serious about using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to become more efficient in their work. Anyone who creates word processing documents and email will greatly benefit from Professional! To know why the professional products are so helpful go HERE.