Does Anyone Use Dragon?

[Darren Frey]

Theres a program called Dragon that allows you to transfer speach to text. I got it for my wife for Christmas last year and she still hasnt used it yet but she says she can talk better than type. I am just the opposite. I need time to put thought into my words. My question is has anyone ever used Dragon before or as a means of writing?

[Jill Karg]

I haven't but have been told it is a nice tool by other writers in my writer's group locally. I had an older version of it (bought 7 years ago) and it took too long to setup for me to use it. But hopefully they fixed most of those bugs.

[dpaterso]

Moving this to Tech Talk forum, where you'll find similar threads... use the Search This Forum option in Tech Talk to look for dragon (or similar search string) to find 'em.

-Derek

[Medievalist]

It can work quite well. You need a high quality mic. You need to spend time training it. You need to "write" in a quiet place, and you need to be prepared for extensive editing, especially while training. The training is as much for the user as for the software.

[TheMindKiller]

It's a good tool, but it's very picky. It's actually pretty easy to setup (I use it on the iPad), but when recording you need to cut down all ambient noise to increase accuracy. As has already been said, you need a high-quality mic to record accurately.

I wouldnt consider this the best replacement for someone who would prefer to speak their stories instead of type them but I'd say it's the best available.

[Zelenka]

We use it for work for live subtitling and it's okay with some things, others not so much. Like some others have said, it needs training - basically the more you use it, the better it gets, especially the newer version 11, it's much improved on 10, in our experience here. We've found that ambient noise isn't as much of a problem as Dragon makes it out to be, as we work in an open plan newsroom with people working all around us, talking right behind us at times, and it manages to cope, so long as it's set up with the sort of environment that you will be working in. So if there is a bit of background noise when you work, make sure it's there when you're training the mic etc. We tried IBM as well but found it to be nowhere near as accurate. One problem is though that its settings can be a bit odd at times and difficult to navigate, and we all switched off the "commands" built into it, so that if it mishears something, at least it's not trying to open MS Outlook or something else, which it did with us for the first few days we used it.

My boss is very into it though, and certainly it's been a godsend for the live show we have to subtitle from 1am to 5.30am. Typing that live for that amount of time was killing!

[FOTSGreg]

When I bother to use it, and I love it, my productivity goes through the roof. Unfortunately I tend to write in environments where someone mumbling into their computer would be somewhat frowned upon or at least looked askance at. I'm considered weird enough without talking to myself all the time (the onlookers will tolerate typing on a laptop or even on my iPad, but the headphones and mike? Uh huh).

Plus there's lots of noise behind me most of the time from conversation and jukebox. I find Dragon 10 doesn't tolerate that very well.

Changing headphones and mike upsets it and I ended up having to almost completely retrain it. Going from a noisy background to a quiet one confuses it. Sitting in a quiet room with virtually no ambient noise and it sometimes picks up sounds best left untyped (soda burps, sniffles, coughs, sometimes even adjusting the mike).

I've got it loaded on all my machines and will go back to using it as soon as my life settles into more of a routine in a week or three.

Like I said, when I'm using it my productivity goes through the roof, bit there are times I really miss thinking through my fingers.

[Kevans]

I use it. I am the very model of a two fingered typist, the dragon makes productivity great. The best part of four novels and twenty shorter works have come out of this system.

One thing to remember, the dragon does not speak English. The program only puts down what it thinks it hears. This can lead to some odd results, for example I once said "springs and levers" and the dragon wrote down "Friends and Lovers..."

Perhaps a side benefit is the detailed first revision, just to fix the dragonizims.

Basically the program makes me money.

Regards,
Kevin

[Zelenka]

I use it. I am the very model of a two fingered typist, the dragon makes productivity great. The best part of four novels and twenty shorter works have come out of this system.

One thing to remember, the dragon does not speak English. The program only puts down what it thinks it hears. This can lead to some odd results, for example I once said "springs and levers" and the dragon wrote down "Friends and Lovers..."

Perhaps a side benefit is the detailed first revision, just to fix the dragonizims.

Basically the program makes me money.

Regards,
Kevin

Ours at work has produced some hilarious ones. We use it to do the weather forecast because we need it typed up asap to be pre-recorded and the forecaster speaks at a million words per second, so it was killing us typing. At one point he said 'it's going to stay blustery' and Dragon's translation was 'his quintic stayed lustily', which we thought was quite poetic. We actually keep a file of the best ones. Although recently it's learned some rude words from somewhere and keeps putting those in.

[kuwisdelu]

I have a dragon, but I don't let him out of his cave very often.

[Tirjasdyn]

When I had a long commute to work I used the mobile version of dragon (digital recorder that i plugged in my computer and then dragon automatically wrote out the text.) It worked really well once I trained it to recognize my fantasy world terms.

I've started playing with dragon diction that came with the Mytouch4g I just bought. It's pretty good at dialing the right numbers but for actual diction into a text app it needs more training.

[FantasiaFrogDesigns]

Theres a program called Dragon that allows you to transfer speach to text. I got it for my wife for Christmas last year and she still hasnt used it yet but she says she can talk better than type. I am just the opposite. I need time to put thought into my words. My question is has anyone ever used Dragon before or as a means of writing?

My husband has it and he found it frustrating. It makes quite a few errors and he spoke very clearly. I probably would find it useful despite that fact, say while I'm driving in the car and can't jot and idea down. Typos are a part of my editing process no matter what I do, as long as I can figure out what the overall meaning is. :)