Last week, I visited a friend with the purpose of helping him use Dragon Naturally Speaking for dictation. He's an older fellow, born in Texas and still bearing the accent. He writes books and his editors have a hard time reading his handwriting. Dictating directly into a Microsoft Word document would certainly be a productivity boon for their company.
He had tried an earlier version of Dragon years ago with no success. Given that the latest version is touted as being more accurate, I said we should try it again. If Dragon comes with support for Indian English (insert your favorite Far East Indian phrase here), it should certainly be able to handle his accent, right?
He agreed to give it a go, purchased a license, and spent money on a very nice USB headset with microphone.
We worked at it for two days. On the first day, we discovered his manner of saying certain words would quite regularly throw Dragon for a loop. For example, "on" and "own" or "form" and "farm". With enough training (e.g., 10 or more repetitions), Dragon would eventually get it straight.
We also realized that he couldn't just sit back, close his eyes, and speak in his normal manner (i.e., what I like to think of as his thinking mode). Instead, he had to sit up, put his attention on the screen, and purposefully enunciate his words.
In the end, we backed away from using Dragon. And it was for more reasons than Dragon's being able to handle his speech. He's not a computer user and he'll never be a computer user.
With me or another person by his side, he could make progress because we could help him catch mistakes and correct them. But when somebody's not there, a simple mistake would mess things up and he wouldn't be able to recover. For example, if he is dictating into Microsoft Word and accidentally moved the cursor in the document then text would be inserted into the wrong spot and he wouldn't be able to handle it. Or if he ran into another drawlish word that Dragon would just not get right, he wouldn't be able to train Dragon on his own.
In other words, the fact that he had to deal with a computer made it a continuously frustrating experience for him.
I look at this friend as an extremely hard scenario for Dragon to handle. In all fairness, within 15 minutes, I had it working quite well for another friend and myself.
Are there any Southerners or Texans out there who are successfully using Dragon?
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Sean Winstead