Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I began using speech recognition three years ago because of the volume of research and writing that I do. The reviews for Dragon NaturallySpeaking compared to Windows speech recognition then seemed to concur that WSR was just as good as anything from Nuance. I have always found Windows speech recognition a tad frustrating in the number of errors in recognition results and the poor microphone volume control. The add-on macros are a nice addition to WSR. With the release of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13, I decided to try it to see if it would perform better than the built in Microsoft option. The installation was painless as well as the initial setup. There is no training required to get started, and the accuracy was surprisingly high without this requirement; however, I have since read one of the training documents because of the amount of text that I have to dictate every day, I wanted to ensure greater accuracy. Since purchasing DNS13 on August 11, 2014 I've dictated just over 6,000 words; out of curiosity I did track corrections that had to be made, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking's accuracy came in at 99.2%. My VXi TalkPro UC2 microphone is working very well with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, much better than it was with Windows speech recognition. The product integrates well with Microsoft Word and Outlook, but all of the default hotkeys must be changed otherwise you cannot create formulas in Excel. It is unfortunate that after all of these years that people have requested integration with Microsoft OneNote, the only thing DNS 13 can manage is the ribbon; text cannot be dictated directly into the program. One thing I do miss about Windows speech recognition is the add-on macros tool where I could build routine formatting commands. I use this extensively in Microsoft OneNote; for example, I would dictate a line and then voice a command that would select the entire line, set the font point size, set tags, and then enter a double line feed. If you try to dictate into some web forms, such as Amazon's search field, the Internet Explorer Full Text Control browser add-on does crash Dragon NaturallySpeaking (according to the DNS and Windows event logs), and corrupt all right-click context menus in Windows 7; a reboot is required to clear up the problem. With Firefox, the browser add-on simply does not work. There is a plethora of commands available in DNS 13 to suit whatever level of keyboard or mouse interaction you would rather use your voice to control. I particularly like being able to search the web when something comes to mind, the "search the web" command is great. Overall, for me, the product is better than Windows speech recognition, and I can continue to work around the browser add-on crashing, missing Microsoft OneNote integration, and lack of custom formatting commands as quality recognition is my number one need. For now, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 gets four stars; address the missing OneNote integration and the browser add-on crashing, and I might bump it up to five stars.