The Tools I Use

"Take a letter Miss Dragon..."

'Miss Dragon' is my unapproachable, but highly dependable new assistant in the office. I employ her skills to do my typing, while I get on with the creative act of thinking up what to say. To say she has revolutionized my working day is no understatement.

I am, of course, describing my recent purchase of the amazing Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 dictation software.

I find that my creative flow suffers when I'm typing, even though, like many people I am a reasonable typist. I often have to compose a sentence in my head, then try to remember it as I type and the result is just not as fluid as I'd like.

What I wanted, especially for longer items, such as reports, articles and, nowadays, blog entries, was a way of dictating directly to the computer (or via a hyper-efficient assistant who would not need paying!)

Now, I've been aware of voice to text software for some years; I even had a copy of Dragon Dictate 4.0 which came free with some magazine or other a while ago, which worked pretty well but was slow and not accurate enough for my needs. I had my doubts about how effective voice to text software might ever be and left it at that.

I might have carried on being a frustrated typist if I hadn't I met a test pilot when my train broke down one evening.

Having moaned about the state of the railways, we began chatting and it turned out he had worked on the RAF's new jet fighter, the Typhoon. Apparently some of the Typhoon's systems are voice commanded, which, given the nature of a fighter jet's cockpit environment rather amazed me. He assured me that voice recognition technology had moved on considerably since I'd tried that free magazine disc!

Well, armed with that thought, I decided to try voice recognition software once again. So I searched about and settled on Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Preferred Edition, from Nuance, which I ordered from Amazon UK.

I use a Windows XP machine with a reasonable amount of RAM (I think around 1.5Gb) and a fairly full hard drive, so I was prepared to be less than impressed if the software needed lots of performance to operate.

Loading the software was a doddle. I did it while watching TV and while it took a little while, it needed no effort on my part - I didn't miss any of the plot on the TV programme.

Once loaded the ‘work' begins. Unlike a Typhoon you won't have to spend weeks and weeks teaching the system to understand you under a range of difficult high-G combat contitions.

However you are expected to spend a little time (I think it took me an hour) to let the system learn the characteristics of your voice. You just have to read out various bits of text (you can select the type of think you'd prefer to read) while it learns what you sound like.

That is followed by a series of short tutorials that combine learning the various commands and training the software, so it is pretty painless.

Then you are off and running. Initially I found Dragon Naturally 9.0 was accurate around 70%-80% of the time, which sounds a bit dull, but by being diligent and being sure to correct any errors, rather than just erasing errors, I now find, after a week's use, that the software's accuracy is around 90% and improving each time we work together.

What don't I like about it? It is like training a pet really. You have to be prepared, certainly when you first start using it, to stop and correct every mistake it makes. That's a real pain sometimes, but the result is a much quicker improvement in accuracy. Also I could do with being able to switch off some of the non-dictation commands (you can use Dragon to navigate around your PC, open files, save them etc etc) which is more than I need. It may be possible of course; I haven't yet read the manual!

Would I recommend this to anyone? Yes, wholeheartedly. I have found, to my surprise, that my writing style changes when I dictate. New words and phrases come to mind and I can develop ideas much more thoroughly than by typing alone.

For any long form writing, like stories, reports, articles or blog posts, I've already found my productivity has increased and the amount of useable material I can produce at a single sitting has also increased.

Regularly I have to transcribe handwritten documents for use on the computer. I have begun using Dragon Dictate to do the typing whilst I am reading the document out loud and I'm finding it is much easier, and more accurate, than trying to read and type simultaneously.

I have begun playing with dictating to my MP3 recorder and getting the software to transcribe the recordings for me. So far the results are encouraging rather than earth shattering, but I haven't put much effort in to it yet and I expect the results to be more impressive once I've had a little more practice.

The price of around £100 or so is just fine with me. It is a serious business tool and one I would be loathe to give up. Rather than shop around for the lowest price (and there are some very dodgy looking deals out there!) I plumped for Amazon and was pleased with the speed of delivery and the product itself.

So when considering your next assistant, forget the blonde bombshell and go for the Dragon!

Hugh Waters is a broadcast technical consultant and web developer, who has to do a LOT of typing in his working day!