27 July 2011
M regular readers will know that I have been having a certain amount of trouble with my voice activation-Dragon Naturally Preferred version 11. Now, I have used this particular program since the first version came out, something like 20 years ago, and in those days it cost around £1000 and, to be honest, it was pretty useless. I seem to remember that you had to dictate to lines at a time and having checked that they were okay transfer them to your text document. A slogan of glorious process hardly worthwhile unless you could not at all. As each version has been released this software has got better and better..
When I received version 11 I found it was reproducing my dictated text .pretty well 100% but was not responding correctly to my commands. It is absolutely amazing how many things you can do with commands not only the default ones within the program itself but your own special commands such as’ my usual e-mail address#, or ‘my usua signature ‘.
After three sessions with the Dragon technical team, around an hour and a half each, we had still not really improved matters very much so in desperation the senior technician decided to send me version 11.5, which we loaded yesterday. For the moment it does appear to be an improvement but I will let my readers know, in due course, if version 11.5 has solved the problem.
In the meantime readers might be amused to see this little video on voice activation. Just click on the link below.