Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred Wireless

Review by Paul Tynegate for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred Wireless
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I have just upgraded from Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 to 10. I am happy to report that so far, after a couple of days trial, this upgrade seems to have been well worth it in terms of increased accuracy. (BUT SEE LATER!) At the same time I was tempted into purchasing the alleged integrated Calisto Bluetooth microphone, attracted by the special price, the convenience of a wireless headset, and the promise of increased accuracy.

However, I have run into two problems, either of which makes the Calisto currently useless. In the first place, the Bluetooth insert device for the USB port cuts out after an hour or two of usage. Its function is only restored after completely rebooting the computer.

The second problem is far more serious. Once the Plantronics Calisto is activated, Dragon Naturally Speaking demands that you ” prepare this user for dictation”. You would probably be encouraged to note that the accuracy level of the new Calisto is rated very high. You are then required to read a passage from a selected text. When Dragon is satisfied with your reading, it will present you with a dialogue box telling you to wait while your user files are being adjusted for your reading. In my case my computer then simply hung up, and could not be started up again without a complete reboot. Two different Dragon phone techs attempted to solve the problem unavailingly, the second one promising I would get a call back from a top expert capable of solving the problem. No reply over the last two days, and similarly no reply yet to an email I sent them yesterday informing them of the Bluetooth insert failure.

I started dictating this review with DNS 10, but, sadly it first began reverting to a habit Id seen before with DNS 9, that is, starting up a new sentence or phase one letter too early. Finally, it gave up altogether and refused to accept any dictation from my old and otherwise commendable Plantronic DSP 400 mic.

So I can hardly recommend purchase of any of this Nuance equipment right now unless you’re willing to pay good money for what amounts to a rather unpromising Beta version. But if they had waited to get the bugs out first, they might well have something really to get excited about. Maybe wait six months, a year?

Lesson: I should have paid attention to earlier negative Amazon reviews. (I trusted Nuance on the basis of good experience with earlier versions.)

Review by R. Cargill for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred Wireless
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Product is Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred Mobile.

Purchased this product here and it arrived quickly. It came with the Philips Digital Voice Tracer 7655. Before I installed the Dragon software, I tried the Digital Voice Tracer (recorder) and it did not work. Checked the batteries and they were fine. Made sure they were in right, still a dead recorder. So now the fun begins (sorry this might be long). I contact Customer Support via email (I had to register on their web site to do this). They say that I must contact technical support “as they will try to determine if you have a defective/damage recorder. If it is indeed damage then they will be the one to replace it for free.”

So I call technical support. They tell me that I must contact Philips to verify that it really doesn’t work! Of course, I’m thinking that they’re going to pass the buck. They will send me an email and I can reply to that after I talk to Philips. Unfortunately, there is no phone number to contact Philips in the package materials. I check their web site and after getting transferred 3 times to different Philips divisions, a voicemail says that I should contact the people that sold it to me for technical support!

So I email customer service and let them know that 1) I never received an email to reply to and 2) Philips said to contact them. I get a response: “We really do apologize for the miscommunication with technical support. However, technical support department is actually the correct department that will handle your issue, kindly contact them again at 1-407-241-1822, so that they can determine if the recorder is defective, if it is, then they will replace it.”

Now this is turning into a major waste of my time. But I dutifully call technical support (again). I have to run through the whole thing again (they want to be very sure that they can’t charge me for this call after all) and they tell me that I should send a copy of the receipt in response to an email and they would send me a replacement. So, I do that as well and get the following response: “Thank you for sending the requested file. We will be endorsing this to Customer Service and they will provide you an RMA number so you can return the recorder to us for repair/replacement. Thank you.” and another email from Customer Service with a link to the RMA form.

So, here’s where I am:

1. I haven’t installed the software yet, so I don’t know how it works.

2. I have to pay to send the recorder back to them even though they sent me a defective product.

3. I feel like I’m treated like a nuisance to them and they’re making me jump through hoops. This is unacceptable customer support.

Review by Barry Tice for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred Wireless
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I finally received by new Dragon 10 and the Bluetooth bundled ear piece. It took a long time as nuance did not send me any kind of tracking number so I missed the shipment. However, it was well worth the wait. I have to admit I’ve only had this for a few days so I have not experienced the failure of the USB inset the previous viewer has, perhaps I will over time. However, I was thrilled to see how well Bluetooth worked since I was never able to get it to work very well with version 9. Even more impressive, instead of running this on a quad core processor like I did on version 9 I am running this on an Acer netbook with the Atom processor and it works flawlessly, I am very satisfied so far. I wish that I could buy plantronics Bluetooth earpiece separately so that I would have a spare, I never thought Bluetooth would work so well after all the problems I had with various Bluetooth devices in version 9.

Review by Cymry for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred Wireless
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First off, this product installed on my Vaio desktop Vista Home machine without a glitch.

But after the installation, I realized that Dragon’s software did not include the Philips “Voice Tracer” software. So it took me about 45 minutes to hunt down where I could download the Philips software (while I was on infinite hold, and infinite phone menu loops, for support from Philips — none of which ever got me anywhere other than television remote control support).

Nuance/Philips, get your acts together. I don’t care if you don’t send me a CD for the Philips software. Just give me a SPECIFIC url to go get it. Print it on a little piece of paper in the delivered product! Why make your customers go hunt? Come on, you can do better than that. It’s a no brainer. What you do now is nothing short of lazy — at my — your customer’s — expense.

Another gripe. Dragon requires the files it transcribes to be in .WAV format. But the Philips ‘Voice Tracer’ voice recorder — which Philips calls a “digital note taker” if you’re ever looking for support for it on their incomprehensible website — records audio in its own file format: .ZVR

Okay, so the hard-to-find downloaded Philips software will convert .ZVR files to .WAV files so that Dragon can translate them…

…But only one at a time!

For the love of Pete, people! I thought you (Dragon and Philips) coordinated on this.

So I spend a full day recording my thoughts on the Philips voice recorder, creating, overall, 14 voice recorder files — (a new one is created each time I click ‘stop’ on a previous one, and then decide to continue with a new one — BTW, if I opt not to do that, the recorder stays on ‘pause’ mode, eating up battery life).

Now I have to manually convert 14 files, one by one, to .WAV format? If I try to select them all, the Philips software says, “Select ONE file.”

This is beginning to get stupid.

Dragon, why don’t YOU do the work for ME and just work with .ZVR files? Isn’t your job to make this easy for me?

OK, I do the 14, separate, individual file conversions while I could be doing something else like fixing dinner, and the rest goes smoothly.

Well, almost. The Dragon software, after about a page an a half of transcribed text, tells me that I have exceeded the amount of text it can track re corrections. Sigh. It gives me no further clues. Good thing I’ve been twiddling with computers since 1984!

I dived into Dragon’s configuation menus and tweaked the memory available for transcriptions by a factor of 10. I wonder how many new users could figure that out.

Again, Dragon… give more thought to user experience. How many people are going to pay in the hundreds of dollars for software that will only allow them to transcribe a page and a half of thoughts before giving them an uninformative error message?

Is there an executive awake there?

This stupid BS ruins customer ratings, including mine.

Once past all that, my impressions are generally positive.

The Philips voice recorder is small and adequate, with good audio quality. You get 6 hours of audio at the max quality — which is what Dragon wants. The AAA batteries seem well coordinated with that.

Dragon does a pretty amazing job of transcribing voice. It even lets you select transcribed text, play it back, and correct it if it’s wrong. It learns. Excellent.

In fact, amazing. I wrote four pages of text today while I was driving around doing erands. It only took me about an hour to edit and clean up — much less time than it would have taken me to write it at my desktop. Plus, the added productivity time while I was out-and-about doing what would otherwise be unproductive, was a clear win.

For my purposes, this software/hardware combo is a winner.

It will be even better when Dragon/Philips get the customer experience together more re getting started.

I don’t plan to return this product. At the end of the day, I think it’s amazing.

This is a product at the beginning of its practical usefulness, like the spelling checkers of the 1980′s. Before long, it will be a commodity.

For example, today I spoke into the microphone: “The Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.”

Dragon transcription: “There she be punished by the school and she crashed.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. ?

In a few years, this technology will rock and we’ll all take it for granted. Right now, it’s getting useful… in a ‘getting there’ sort of way.

Worth the price at the end of the day, but not without unnecessary effort.

Review by Jeremy Chatelain for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred Wireless
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I am using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to type this review. I am a quadriplegic and have relied on Dragon since version 2. I have been fairly pleased with version 6 for the last seven years and was hesitant to spend the money to upgrade. I am so glad I did. I used to have to dictate a sentence, pause, check for inaccuracies, then continue with the next sentence. Now, when I do my homework, I am able to dictate an entire paragraph from what I am reading before having to take a minute and correct the one or two errors. Its speed and accuracy is an absolute significant improvement.

A couple interesting observations:

I am running Dragon 10 on two computers: one at home with Vista (Quad Core with six gig of RAM), and my work computer with XP Pro (dual core, 1G ram). It seems I have more functionability with Vista, which is ironic. For example, in Vista I can shut down the computer by voice, where with XP it goes through the motions but does not actually shut down. I am having to learn in both operating systems which commands are available in which windows, and which are not (for example, I can say “click Office Button” when I’m in Word, but then cannot click any menu items that come up–unless I say “down 2, right 1, press enter.” Also, Dragon works well in Vista’s PowerPoint 2007, but not XP with 2007. It’s a little inconvenient learning which commands I can use at home and which ones I can use at work, but it is tolerable.

Second: At first I could not get the Plantronics wireless headset to work. I was just about ready to send it all back out of frustration. My difficulties came for two reasons. (A) the Amazon vendor through whom I purchased the “Wireless” package from actually sent the regular Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred package, and then included the Callisto USB wireless headset on the side. Therefore, it had no manuals, no instructions, no help. It took some surfing on the Internet to figure out how to turn the earpiece on, with its varied beeping tones, and to get it to sync with the USB receiver. (B) Once I figured out how to recognize when the wireless headset was active with Dragon, it has worked very well. So, although the vendor saved me some money, it was quite a hassle.

Third: Having more global commands from the desktop and from Internet explorer are very nice. I still have to learn when I can navigate by voice and when I just must use my trackball, but there is far more capability now which saves my paralyzed arm strength.

For any new user of Dragon, it does take time to learn the commands, but with patience it is a very effective tool. For anyone like me who absolutely must have a voice activated program, it was well worth the money to increase my efficiency and reduce my wife’s irritation at me screaming “Scratch That!” every minute.

I would absolutely purchase this product again.