Nuance Dragon Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 13 (Old Version)

I am using the Dragon (DS13) Software 13, and it is an extremely sharp tool. With his help, I do think my computer, and I can take over the internet. If I only had a brain, comes to mind, but this software is great! I recommend this product to any and every writer to preserve the quality of a penciled or penned draft. Have a nice word on me. DMF :)

Ive been a happy user of earlier versions but after my laptop updated itself to windows 10, I found myself forced to buy version 13.0. Purported to be a great improvement, I was sold, but Ive not yet gotten it to work. After the install, I went through the microphone preparation and launched Word. The supplied headset was used. Not a single word was understood. Nothing. Frustrated, I eventually did a clean install only to get an error message that some training directory could not be renamed. Installed again without trouble. Still didnt understand a single word. Switched mics. Nope. Decided to use my wifes brand new i-7 laptop with 16GB. Installed fine but still didnt understand a single word. I reached out to tech support and got a couple suggestions. No good. Reached out again and got a suggestion to check the settings. After 3 laptops, 3 mics, and multiple attempts at setting default mic, sound card settings, hardware acceleration, etc, Ive given up. Fortunately, I found an old laptop and installed version 12.0 on it. It works flawlessly. My new laptop? I use Windows speech recognition. While not as robust as Dragon, it isnt half bad. My only regret is that I tried to upgrade to new and improved. Im beginning to think there might be an error on my disc. Nothing but trouble for me.

I reduced my review from 5 to 3 stars because it has so many problems and they dont fix it. I have to ctrl+alt+del and force stop it. There is no way to make it shut off. It has also stopped backing up my files and I dont know how to make it restart again. If they fix this stuff, I will change my review back to 5 stars. I doubt it..... I am actually using NaturallySpeaking to write this review. I had Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.0 before this, and it did pretty good. But I am shocked and amazed, and how awesome this program is! It is so good it can even tell the difference between end, and and. I put in these little marks because I dont know what you call them. LOL! It can even get things like (egr) correctly. I think this must be what Google uses to do their voice searches. I am doing emails, web searches, reviews like this one, chat sessions, and pretty much anything else that needs typing. Since I type with three fingers on my left hand (because I have my set up for mouse keyboard gaming) I type so slow its pathetic. But I can do this review in about a minute! And thats pretty awesome!

Ive used three previous versions of Dragon (8,10 and 12), and was pretty lukewarm about those. But with 13 Home (and maybe with 12.5), theres some kind of corner that the recognition engine has made, and now its much more accurate, with relatively little training. Ive tried it on both my Windows 7 laptop and Windows 10 desktop with amazing results, where free flowing text is 90+ percent accurate, and often whole paragraphs are mistake-free. I did purchase a higher quality USB microphone, but even the unit that came with the CD was pretty accurate. However, my focus is on first drafts of longer emails, notes, and transcribing hand-written fiction into a computer document. I can easily churn out 1000 words in 10 minutes, spend one or two minutes manually correcting things, and its done. A great time saver. If expanding the use of the product to perform more detailed tasks or control your computer, then the expectations need to be adjusted. Its going to take more time to train it, and learn the limitations, with much more time necessary for the proper learning curve. I have not yet tried anything to complicated, but at least this version is going to allow me that option. Previous versions I just got frustrated with simple drafts.

I used this when I had a really bad accident and couldn’t use my hands. Got this for my mom for her Christmas present for her business that she writes 50+ emails a day. Of course she hasn’t even opened it yet. Sigh. Only con when I used it was that it took a good week or two to recognize my voice, but perfect for nagivating the web, creating word documents/excel, and sending emails all without using your keyboard!

Easy to install, works almost effortlessly, helps my husband take notes for his academic courses, and may help me write the great American novel! I did have some trouble with tech support while installing - they tried to upsell me to a newer version when I reported that the microphone that came with the program was not interacting with the Dragon, and recommended I buy a new microphone with different connectivity. They also said that the sound drivers on my system were incompatible with the program. I was ready to return the product when I changed where I plugged in the microphone, and all worked perfectly. Tech support - bleh; product - great!

I purchased this in 2015. It was working fine until my computer quit. Once the PC was repaired (new logic board) I had to reinstall all my software. When I reinstalled dragon the Serial number no longer worked. I called Nuance and they said since 13 is no longer supported I cannot activate it. THAT IS THEFT!

I very useful tool. I have never been a typist, came through the system before men were encouraged to take typing.When I was appointed as Secretary of our Water Board it became critical for me to find an effective way to produce Board Meeting minutes. I saw an add one evening on the TV and invested in the product. I have been a fan ever since and have begun using it in more of the ways possible in my daily writing activities, especially with the computer. I enjoy not having to depend on others to do this work for me, especially as doing it myself allows me to edit my work while typing it. This is my 3rd upgrade. I encourage everyone who cant type 90 words a minute to consider this as a very workable solution.

For the average person, this would be a nightmare to install. There are NO installation instructions, not even so much as Insert CD in the drive and click on... One must go to the website to troubleshoot the problems. The first problem is that clicking on the Windows installer causes the disk to thrash. I tried this on two different computers running Windows 10 with the same result. What you have to do is ignore their FAQ entitled Program will not install and do the following: 1. Right click on the DVD drive. 2. Right click on Install. Thats it. Nuance could have saved me two hours of frustration had they simply included those instructions on the box or in the foldout reference manual. Also, do not use the optional splitter. Plug both the mic and the speaker jacks into their respective outlets. Once, I was able to execute what should have been a piece of cake implementation that was made needlessly difficult by Nuances terrible marketers/documenters, the software worked beautifully in its tutorial. Should anything change, I will update these comments.

The ballots still out on This software. It doesn’t like learning my cuss words very well but overall not a bad product. Speeds up my typing and I’m really learning how to use the correction functions. I don’t have much of an accent but I feel sorry for somebody that has a southern drawl or other accent because some of the words I say her way out of the park but when I backspace it seems to clear up when I talk slower. I think it’s worth it worth the priceEasy to install just watch out for COM problems see my review. I had the external microphone in my laptop microphone down at the same time and it was giving me an error so make sure you go in your control panel on your computer and turn off your internal microphone if you have one otherwise this joker will jack you up ha ha. They had such pretty tight but the microphone works good