Final verdictĭragon Professional is a powerful speech-to-text tool that will prove ideal for anyone that might want or need to compose documents and emails by voice. You have to pay by transcription volume instead, which won't suit everyone.įrom a purely business perspective, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM all offer their own cloud-based speech recognition platforms, which are more likely to compete directly with Dragon Professional. We were also seriously impressed with Speechmatics, but there's no option to purchase the software outright. Otter.ai, for instance, excels at transcribing live and pre-recorded audio and is very user-friendly, but you wouldn’t use it to draft an email - it’s more for helping with note-taking or transcribing interviews.īraina Pro, meanwhile, offers some of the same virtual assistant functionality as Dragon, but suffers from a clunky and outdated UI. There are a number of different speech recognition tools on the market, but few with quite the same breadth of options. Users that have created an account and registered their product on the Nuance website can also submit questions to the support team via an online form, which is simple enough.Īdministrator guides, datasheets and whitepapers are all readily available on the website, if diving into the documentation is likely to yield the solution you’re after. Nuance offers a business hours telephone hotline between 9am to 5pm from Monday-Friday, which means professional users will be covered, but individuals using the kit after hours or on the weekend might come unstuck. If you want to use the software to navigate the web, it’s best to install the relevant plugin for Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer. For example, you could switch from drafting a letter in Word to working in Google Docs via your browser, and Dragon will operate with the active application tab. You can also use Dragon for multiple tasks at once. If you want to temporarily deactivate the microphone, you can put it into rest mode by saying “Go to sleep” and reactivate by saying “Wake up”. When composing documents, the microphone is always active and ready to receive dictation. Clicking on the microphone icon in the center of the bar will activate listening mode, allowing you to deliver commands. Once the software has been booted up, an auto-collapsing menu hovers at the top of the screen, awaiting instruction. This made the transcription almost useless, because we had to listen back through to the recording in order to clear up the document.Īctivating the transcription feature will also freeze all other facilities, meaning you can’t dictate an email while an existing recording is being processed. Instead of producing a neatly transcribed document, the software churned out a thick block of text, without paragraph breaks or any indication of a change in speaker.

However, we ran into some quite significant issues when running recordings through the software. You can also use Dragon to transcribe existing audio recordings, which is (in theory) an excellent feature for anyone tasked with writing up meeting actions or transcribing interviews. The trick is to think through the full sentence in your head first before delivering into the microphone, which will still be quicker than typing for some people, especially those that suffer with poor mobility in the hands. However, you get the swing of it after a while - and if you’re stuck, all you need to do is ask “What can I say?”. It’s a little tricky to get used to composing a document or email with your voice and we often struggled to remember the correct command for each specific situation. Featuresĭragon is at its best in live dictation mode, which allows you to draft documents and emails hands-free via an extensive range of navigation, correction, formatting and punctuation commands. Pricing will vary with each specific implementation, so quotes are only available via the sales team.

This might be the better option for non-business users that don't want to commit to the significant cost attached to a permanent license.įinally, businesses that want to roll out the speech recognition software across an entire team or workforce will want to consider Dragon Professional Group or Dragon Anywhere Group. The publisher offers an upgrade option that allows owners of Dragon Professional v14 to shift to the most up-to-date version at a discount ($150/£169.99).Ī subscription-based service called Dragon Anywhere is also available for iOS and Android for either $15/mo (£10.99/mo) or $150 billed annually (£109.99). We reviewed Dragon Professional Individual, which is available for $300 (£349.99) or $450 (£429.00) with a compatible wireless headset.

Nuance Dragon Professional at Amazon for $48.95ĭragon speech recognition software is available in a few different forms.

Dragon naturally speaking headset