Dragon, for those who are not seen it in action, is a speech recognition software. You talk into a microphone connected to your computer and the program transcribes your words into written text.  For those of you who haven’t seen the process of speech recognition before (or those who have only seen earlier versions of voice recognition software), the current version works like magic. 

Who could make good use of speech recognition software?  Anyone who writes.  That probably includes you.  All of you bloggers, take note.  Same for all of you professionals.  For instance, I work as a lawyer and I spend an hour or two each day using Dragon. 

I have worked with Dragon ever since Version 6. It is now up to Version 9.  I use the “Preferred” version of Dragon 9, which costs about $160.  The software comes with a microphone in the box.  The software is loaded with a vast vocabulary of legal and medical terms, something to keep in mind for those of you who might otherwise be tempted to jump to the vastly more expensive Legal or Medical versions of Dragon. For most people, there’s no need to make that jump, in my opinion.

There are millions of people out there who could make good use of voice recognition software. Dragon allows you to give your hands a break, even if you are a proficient typist.  Dragon works so well that it seems like magic. No, I do not own any stock in Nuance …