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  • Russell bewsell

Dragon Naturally Speaking 13 Professional Review


Features and Capabilities

Dragon Naturally Speaking 13 Professional is an innovative speech recognition program for use with Windows PC’s. Dragon allows you to simply dictate we see the text cursor appear in almost any application within Windows PC. So where you expect to type, or want to type – you just start speaking. You need to use basic punctuation such as “full-stop” and other commands like “new paragraph” for basic punctuation.

Dragon Professional 13 is the most accurate, most powerful and sophisticated speech recognition software for businesses, corporations, government and educational institutions in the world. The software makers, Nuance Communications, announced its launch and availability on 4 September, 2014. The Dragon Naturally Speaking 13 Professional promises to greatly improve business productivity.

To start with, the Dragon 13 Professional has been designed specifically for business and professional use. Only the Professional Edition has the ability to be managed via the network. This allows and facilitates the storage and synchronization of user profiles, and custom vocabularies and commands. This means that one or two users can create a specialised “corporate vocabulary” have this vocabulary exported to all users within the network that are running Dragon Professional 13. This is not just new words that your particular organisation uses, but the way in which you capitalise words, use acronyms and uniquely format certain terms. Dragon still needs to be installed locally onto the PC. However, the user profiles can be managed by the network and you can share your profile across multiple computers if you have a volume license arrangement.

This means that each user does not have to separately develop a special vocabulary for Dragon. All the work from one of two users can be exported to these other users – greatly improving the efficiency and accuracy of the program for your particular organisation or company. We can show you how to do this as part of our user training.

With the Dragon Professional 13, businesses can bolster their productivity. For example, the program enables users to search the internet, compose and send emails, compile and edit documents or perform any computer-based task by just voicing a command. For example with the Professional Software you can simply say “new email” “reply to email” plus much more within Outlook and other email applications. You can also directly dictate into Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome form fields on the Internet. If your organisation uses Internet-based forms then you can directly dictate into these. This saves a lot of time and is very efficient.

Non-business related activities include posting directly to Facebook, Twitter and other social media applications directly by speaking. If you’re in public relations, this can allow you to create a lot of material by simply speaking. This is far more efficient than typing and will allow you to complete a lot more work in the same period of time – simply by speaking.

More importantly, all this can be done at the user’s convenience. For instance, employees can use the software to accomplish business tasks in the field, office or on the go. As Dragon Professional supports digital voice recorders such as the Olympus DS 7000 you can dictate into your voice recorder and have the dictation transcribed into text at a later stage when you get back to your computer.

When used to its fullest extent, Dragon 13 Professional replaces the keyboard and mouse. Now, employees can perform computer tasks without using a keyboard. This is innovative because using the keyboard to perform repetitive tasks such as writing and sending emails is associated with repetitive strain risks. Dragon has the potential to reduce the number of sick days and to limit the liability from injury claims when implemented properly in a workplace. Over the last 10 years or so Dragon has probably saved thousands of users in Australia from typing injuries and rehabilitated many other people back to productive work by allowing them to dictate rather than type.

Not only does the Dragon Naturally Speaking (wiki link) 13 Professional have the capacity to simplify employees’ work and enhance productivity, but it is also very fast and accurate. All a user needs to do is give a voice command, and the software will recognize it within a fraction of a second, execute the instruction and voila! The job is done.

For example you could create a command that inputs your standard response to a certain type of email. Would not need to dictate the entire email, you would simply say “insert standard response”. These voice macros are very powerful and will allow you to complete a lot of work without speaking too much or typing at all. We call these “macro commands” and they allow you to assign verbal commands to large amounts of complex text.

You can do more than just put in text. You can insert graphics, ask Dragon to click on certain buttons or keyboard combinations. You can actually ask Dragon to log into your banking website, however I would not recommend this for security purposes. Call us to discuss your specific requirements on 1300 255 900 about your daily workflow by using voice recognition software.

The efficiency of the Dragon Professional 13 for businesses is bolstered by the fact that it can be used to perform a wide range of tasks at the workplace. For instance, employees can automate work processes, collect, store, access, retrieve and share data and information by simply giving a voice command. You need to set this up initially, however we can help with this by providing remote training in Australia.

A separate version is available called Dragon Dictate for Mac for those who use the Apple operating system.

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  1. Dragon 13 Announced! New version of Naturally Speaking. - […] guys. A new Dragon Professional 13 review has popped up as well. Worth a read. […]

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