nüvifone™. The navigation phone.
Entered CNET Catalog: 07/29/2006
SKU: A109A-G00-9.0
Manufacturer: Nuance Communications, Inc. (ScanSoft)
Manufacturer description
Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 9 gives small business users and PC enthusiasts the power to create documents, reports, e-mails and more - all by speaking! Fast, easy and amazingly accurate, it's over three times faster than typing. Just use your voice to dictate and edit in Microsoft Word and Excel, Corel WordPerfect, and virtually all Windows-based applications. You can even dictate into a handheld device when you're away from your PC, or use a Bluetooth microphone! It's never been easier to use - no script reading required, so you can get started right away!CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 08/16/2006
Dragon 9 runs only on Windows XP or 2000 SP4 or higher, so Mac users are out of luck, and it requires 512MB of RAM and 1GB of free hard drive space. (Attempting to run Dragon with less RAM will result in a sluggish system, as we discovered in our tests on several computers.) We tested the $149 Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 9. Home users who don't need support for mobile devices can opt for the $99 Standard. Offices that want to run Dragon on a network should choose Professional. Legal and Medical editions are also available.
If you choose Typical/Complete installation rather than Custom, you can bypass the dictation training and shave off as much as half an hour from the setup process. Installing Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 from its two discs took about 15 minutes in our tests, with another several minutes spent to set up the included line-in microphone and headset. You'll have to buy a supported USB or Bluetooth headset separately if your PC lacks line-in jacks.
During its installation, make sure you select the check box that lets you bypass dictation setup; we wish this were selected by default, but it's not. Otherwise, you'll be forced to read a long passage of text as required by prior versions of Dragon. When we chose Custom installation to load Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 on another PC, we still had to do the dictation training. We couldn't quit the dictation and save our work up to that point, either; any interruption would mean starting over from scratch. However, if you don't speak clearly, it might be a good idea to read the training script anyway. If not, you may find yourself constantly correcting Dragon to help it adjust to your lisp or Texas twang.
Make sure not to talk with overbearing emphasis, like C-3PO from Star Wars, when you use Dragon, because it's built to understand your natural patterns of talking. People have caused voice damage by shouting at speech-to-text software, no joke if you already suffer from repetitive stress injuries. We recommend walking through the tutorial, which showed us, for instance, how to tell Dragon to "Go to sleep," and then say, "Wake up," to begin dictating again without having to touch the keyboard, as in Dragon 8.
Before you run Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 for the first time, you'll have to walk through the New User wizard to select your vocabulary--either General, Commands Only, or Teens--and to allow time for Dragon to fish through files on your hard drive for words and phrases you commonly use. Dragon scans writing samples from Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, and text files, which took about five minutes on our well-worn personal laptop.
Once Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 is running, it displays as a slim toolbar on top of your screen, smaller than in version 8. Dragon 9 operates in tandem with other software you're running, so you can dictate within pretty much any text editing program, including Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect in addition to Lotus Notes, Outlook, Outlook Express, and America Online. We were even able to make selected text bold in Google Writely beta without touching the mouse or the keyboard. You can dictate e-mails, too. In addition, voice commands enable you to surf the Net by voice. Dragon handily labels Web links by number; just say the number to "click" the link.
Dragon types faster than most fingers can, at up to 160 words per minute. During dictation, we were delighted with Dragon's performance with multisyllabic words. In a flash, it even spelled "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." Dragon would probably perform better than most high schoolers in a spelling bee, except that it can confuse homophones. Dragon's intelligence often helps it to determine the context in which you are speaking, so that it won't type, say, "I like to eat chocolate, and I scream," when you mentioned "ice cream."
Still, you'll need to speak as clearly as possible to achieve the desired effect. Dragon often confused our prepositions and dropped the "ed" endings of our verbs. Dragon does take some effort to master. When the microphone was too close to our mouth, Dragon sometimes spelled "the" when we breathed. And if you don't review Dragon's command words before using the program, you might accidentally open software menus, as we did when we spoke the word "system," or highlight words when you dictate "select."
Nuance Software says that Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 achieves up to 99 percent accuracy. In our tests, we were impressed with Dragon's abilities to spell out what we were saying quickly. But its accuracy with our sometimes mumbling voice wasn't as stellar as advertised--perhaps more like 70 to 80 percent. When we said "various," Dragon typed "areas." "Dictation" came across as "to teach in." Dragon's mistakes can be funny. For example, while using Dragon to write this review, we dictated "on our personal laptop," and Dragon typed "an hour per signal laptop."
Luckily, you can command Dragon to select and replace words; its list of alternate spellings from among its 300,000 word vocabulary often showed what we really wanted. And you can add new words easily. The more we corrected Dragon over several weeks, the better it seemed to interpret our speech, a strength that we found lacking in ViaVoice, as well as in Windows XP's built-in speech-to-text tool.
You can add multiple profiles of your own voice to Dragon in order to use it at home or at work with different microphones and noise conditions, but the single-user license is not built to handle multiple people's voices. We wish Dragon 9 would allow someone else to sit down and dictate on our computer or that it could transcribe group conversations. At this point, you can't just feed Dragon an MP3 podcast and expect it to accurately transcribe what a talk show host and guests are gabbing about. A fuzzy recording of a professor's lecture won't do you much good, either.
Still we're glad that Dragon supports MP3, WAV, and WMA audio files. You can create a profile of your voice for a mobile recording device, such as a Pocket PC handheld. After you record your thoughts on the go, you can feed Dragon that sound file later for transcription.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 9's support offerings are thorough, with an online knowledge base and user forums, in addition to the essential, built-in tutorial and performance assistant. But you'll pay dearly for personal help: $19.95 per phone call after one freebie and $9.95 for each incident via e-mail.
If you own an earlier version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the costly upgrade to version 9 may be unnecessary. Nuance has added some ease-of-use tweaks, and it says that Dragon 9 improves its accuracy by 20 percent. Yet we found the latter improvement hard to measure in our tests; our old version 8 seemed just as useful for typing and surfing. Overall, Dragon is the best consumer tool available for digital dictation, and we recommended it over ViaVoice. Despite Dragon's learning curve, no other software lets you ignore the keyboard so much, both to type while you talk as well as to command your Web browser.
User opinions
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User Rating: 
10/10
Finally, Dragon (version 10) works with Outlook 2007 !
Pros: Ease of use
Upgrading from previous version 9 and 9.5
Cons: nothing to complain about so far !
User Rating: 
2/10
cant get this to load
Pros: the medical version at work led me to try the lesser home version. It is junk and Nuance support is horrible.
Cons: buggy installation
User Rating: 
8/10
effective and user-friendly tool
Pros: surprisingly accurate speech recognition
Cons: uncomfortable microphone headset
With this version the big surprise is that the speech recognition is mostly accurate. Even during the first day of use, the increased productivity was noticeable. Other than technical words and proper names, the accuracy seems better than 90%. The accuracy is so good that I can focus on the documents without needing to pay close attention to the transcription appearing on the monitor.
It's easy to dictate while paging through documents and websites. It's a lot simpler than looking back and forth between documents and keyboard. And more comfortable than maintaining the typing position.
My main criticism is the microphone headset is uncomfortable. The headband squeezes my temples and pushes my hair down.
As far as 99% accuracy, it's hard to understand where this figure came from. But even at 90%+ accuracy, productivity is much better than typing.
I wish I had bought this software sooner.
User Rating: 
5/10
dissapointing
Pros: accurate, fast enough
Cons: customizing and compatibility poor
I recently bought Dragon Preferred and installed it on a Pentium 4 - 3,6 Mhz.
Dragon is more accurate in recognizing, but by no means faster than the old program on the old computer!
Dragon is useless for performing commands in e.g. open office and paint shop pro. It does not respond at all, or perform completely different tasks than spoken.
With VoiceExpress pro 5 I could learn the program performing very specific commands in any specific program. This is not possible with Dragon preferred.
User Rating: 2/10
DON"T WAST YOUR MONEY!!! DO NOT BUT!!!
Pros: easy to install.
Cons: Dictate wrong words all the time and the company wants money for technical help. this "NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME" software.
I am an electronic engineer with a computer science master degree. I just brought the dragon naturally speaking 9 software for my son and we are having trouble getting it work correctly. For example, it can not dictate "I" or "my"... When I try to get help, it cost me money to get support from the developers.
I think I pay enough and do not want to invest any more time or money on this product. Especially when I'll be working for the company by helping the developers to trouble shoot this "NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME" software.
User Rating: 10/10
My Voice Have Become My Hands!
Pros: You Will Never Touch Your Keyboard Again!!
Cons: Get the wrong microphone get the wrong quality
User Rating: 2/10
Save your money!
Pros: Faster than previous versions.
Cons: Buggy, Fails to recognize many Window Commands.
The worst feature is NUANCE's meager tech support. One free call, $19.95 thereafter each incident, $9.95 each each mail per incident. I have a fast machine with plenty of memory; shut the firewall and virus checker off too.
If you have seen the latest televison commercials, there is no truth in NUANCE's advertising. One would think you're going to have a wonderful time but you'd be very disappointed. Save the money unless you like aggravation and torture.
Take a typing course because in the end, that will be money well spent.
User Rating: 
3/10
FALSE ADVERTISING
Pros: great dication when it wants to work
Cons: FALSE CLAIMS about Thunderbird
User Rating: 2/10
It works sometimes
Pros: Works with Word and a few other programs
Cons: Fails with all the tools I use
In Adobe FrameMaker, the industry-standard tool for technical authors, even the $1K professional cannot select text, cannot move around in the document, cannot use menu commands... So you say a few words, spend time fixing the mistakes Dragon made, and then reach for the mouse to do your work.
If you cannot use a mouse the program is useless.
User Rating: 
4/10
Poor customer support--couldn't get started
Pros: Don't know -- couldn't get it loaded
Cons: Horrible customer support
this product requires only 1 GHz. But the software refused to let me install because it saw only .8GHz as insufficient. First call to customer service revealed that ALL calls to customer service cost $19.95 except for one free to complete installation -- which should tell you they have a lot installation problems.
Also, customer service is only available East coast time 9 am to 6 pm, Monday-Friday. GOOD LUCK west coasters. You have to call by 3 pm. NO NIGHT or WEEKEND support. GOOD LUCK evening and weekend workers.
Then was put on hold 5 minutes (to miserable, distorted electronic music and incessant repeating of the welcome message). Finally talked to someone on a delayed phone line -- we kept talking over each over and having to repeat ourselves. She told me I could get help from tech service -- gave me a non-tollfree number to call.
Same thing -- long delay with irritating, distorted electronic music -- and repeating of "this will cost you $19.95; have your credit card ready." Finally talked to technicial who refused to tell me the work-around unless I gave him my name, phone # and serial number which would use my ONE FREE CALL.
I gave up and sent it back. IF THIS IS HOW THEY TREAT A NEW BUYER, HOW ARE THEY GOING TO TREAT A CUSTOMER WHO IS STUCKW WITHT HE PRODUCT?
User Rating: 5/10
Warning: does not work with Outlook
Pros: very good recognition accuracy
Cons: does not work with Outlook, requires powerful system
Beware. If you use Outlook, this version of Dragon is not compatible with it. You would think so if you read the marketing, unless you look very closely. Dragon crashes if you try to use it with Outlook.
It is compatible with other Microsoft applications. but not Outlook. Dragon wants you to buy the professional version for that.
I think that's ridiculous. I will not buy another updated version of Dragon until they make it compatible with Outlook.
Otherwise, the product works well although it is resource intensive.
In fact, I dictated this review with it.
Frankly, I'd much rather have it work with Outlook than with Web forms.
User Rating: 2/10
U better not need help!
Pros: Worked OK for a while
Cons: It has disappeared from computer
The headset is too cheap.
User Rating: 
9/10
Astounding piece of software!
Pros: Accuracy is impressive.
Cons: None so far.
Make sure you "train" it. Once you train it, the accuracy is very impressive.
I now consider DNSP9 indispensible.
User Rating: 9/10
Wonderfully efficient... easy to use.
Pros: Works extremely well, can type out letters and reports very quickly
Cons: Takes a lot of computing power, and sometimes interferes with system hangups (usually they go away)
In the last two years I have developed a disability and my hands were I am unable to use the keyboard or mouse without a lot of pain. Dragon NaturallySpeaking got me through my final year of college, and now enables me to be productive in my workplace.
Now that I have learned about it, even if my hands were to heal, I would still use this program. There is no reason not to -- it is so easy! And, as much as I really love typing (which I do), this is much faster than even my quickest best typing at about 70 words per minute.
I highly recommend this program. Just make sure you have the RAM to support it.
User Rating: 
1/10
Not ready for remote dictations
Pros: OK for at-the-computer dictating
Cons: Training Dragon away from the computer is so rigid as to make the application useless for that purpose.
However, buy a high-quality Digital Voice Recorder and submit training dictations: trouble.
Dragon requires training dictations of a minimum 15 minutes duration. However, if there is something wrong with your dictation - too much noise, too much clipping, etc. - Dragon rejects your training dictation, and you have wasted more than 15 minutes. Worse: you get a generic rejection notice that provides no clues specific to your dictation.
If you have to make several tries, and they fail, you can waste enormous amounts of time and get literally nothing for your efforts.
They could fix this problem by allowing test runs of 1-2 minutes, but their UI is very rigid.
If all you want to do is talk to your computer, Dragon is OK. I could see using it if I had difficulties with hands or arms, for example.
But if you want to use this for transcribing reports, do what I did: use a human transcriptionist.
User Rating: 1/10
Terrible, DO NOT PURCHASE
Pros: None at all because it won't let me use it
Cons: Can't get it to register so I can't use it
User Rating: 9/10
Works good as long as you use it correctly
Pros: Pretty cool
Cons: Depends on how you speak into it and what type of microphone use.
User Rating: 3/10
Different Opinion
Pros: It actually did get about 80% right, when and if it worked
Cons: Failed to dictate to many programs
User Rating: 9/10
Outstanding software
Pros: Super-fast, adapts well
Cons: No keyword scripting in Preferred edition
User Rating: 9/10
now a usable product
Pros: High level of accuracy with minimal training. Ability to train the progam to use abbreviations unique to your use.
Cons: people who have tried previous version such as myself may be reluctant to try it again.
User Rating: 9/10
Great dictation software
Pros: Very easy to use, very accurate
Cons: needs lots of memory
