Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Premium review

Dragon NaturallySpeaking aims to reduce your keyboard usage by letting you issue voice commands to control Windows as well as dictate documents; the latter converts your words into text as you speak. This version comes nearly two years after the last upgrade, and drops the confusingly-named 'Preferred' edition, leaving a choice of Home or Premium packages.

Installation is simple, although you’ll need about 2GB of hard disk space on your main Windows partition regardless of what drive you select. Having activated the software online, the next step is to spend a few minutes training Dragon to recognise your voice (multiple profiles are allowed for different users). Heavy accents can be an issue, but there are presets to help with Australian, Indian and Southeast Asian voices.

The only difficulty we had was with the glitchy way Windows 7 handles external audio devices. NaturallySpeaking’s basic microphone headset worked fine eventually; there are new audio checks and tips to help identify problems, but it still took a bit of trial and error. You can also transcribe from digital audio files or by plugging in a voice recorder via USB or the PC’s line-in jack.

As before, a simple toolbar is displayed while NaturallySpeaking is running. A new optional Dragon Sidebar lists the commands the software understands. If you’ve used NaturallySpeaking before, you’ll find some options have moved around and changed names, which may be irritating at first but does make things a little clearer.

You’ll also miss the small floating Results Box that used to show progress as your words were recognised. The makers say this proved too distracting, so, although it can be turned back on, the default is now just to show just a small icon. Dragon worked fast enough for us to read long passages at a normal speed, but the delay in displaying text meant we had to go back for corrections rather than spotting them immediately.

Besides dictating text and formatting instructions (such as “comma” or “delete back two words”), you can also use NaturallySpeaking to control your PC. A similar feature is built into Windows 7, but having both together is useful. For example, while working in Word you can save or open a file without reaching for the mouse. There’s a wide range of commands for Windows and Office apps, and handy new smart shortcuts allow complex operations such as “Search Wikipedia for autodidact”. New commands can be set up to enter preset text and/or graphics, but not to control software or system functions; the Home version lacks this feature, along with some of the application-specific options and transcription from digital recorders.

Software that actually understands what you say is still science fiction, but Dragon uses a whole range of tricks to detect words correctly. Like previous versions, this upgrade offers incrementally better accuracy. We had one mistake every few sentences, which, considering the complexity of speech and how many words sound alike, is impressive. Your results may differ, but should continue to improve over time. When entering text, NaturallySpeaking used about three times more processor power than typing, and it does like plenty of RAM.

The theme of this upgrade is giving you better results with less fuss. Users of version 10, however, have few compelling reasons to purchase, but those considering dictation software for the first time will be pleasantly surprised by Dragon’s performance.