Customer Ratings & Reviews

dragon review I'm an author. I write thousands of words per day. I've also used Dragon Professional in various capacities since some of the first versions in the late '90s, but for the purposes of this review I've used it to dictate thousands of words for various novels. Once in a while someone will give the advice that authors need to use dictation to increase their word counts. They invariably recommend Dragon Professional. This is a terrible idea. I have numbers to back it up. I've been training the same Dragon profile using a wired microphone for several years now. In that time I notice that a page of writing (defined as 300 words) has anywhere from 3 to 5 errors. That's in keeping with Dragon's promise of 99% accuracy. But let's do some math. 99% accuracy delivers 3-5 errors per page. For the purpose of the math we're doing here let's call it 4 errors per "page" of 300 words. Let's look at three examples: a short romance novel of 60,000 words, a novel of 90,000 words, and a doorstopper fantasy of 150,000 words. In each of those that 99% accuracy means: 800 errors in a 60,000 word romance manuscript. 1200 errors in our 90,000 word generic novel. 2000 errors in our 150,000 word doorstopper fantasy novel. And these are really boneheaded errors. Homonyms, gobbledygook that has nothing to do with what you dictated, and pernicious errors like inserting random words where they don't belong that are really hard to find. No amount of editing will be able to find all the errors. I say this as someone who has had stories go through multiple edits, alpha and beta reads, and still Dragon screwups sneak through. That alone should be enough to keep any author away from their product, but it doesn’t help that their software is plagued by boneheaded issues and their support is less than helpful. Get used to the phrase “You have exceeded your activation limit.” Dragon’s tech support tells you that if you uninstall their program while you’re connected to the Internet then it will open up one of the activations on your license. This is not the case. Every time you install this expensive and useless software on a computer you use up one of your activations. You then have to call support because they don’t have an easy way to deauthorize an activation like all other software has been doing for years. And support will give you the runaround if they feel like you’ve used too many activations. To be clear this is software that you paid for. You should be able to use it however you please as long as you’re installing it on one machine, but good luck getting Nuance tech support to see it that way. In summary: This software introduces far too many errors to be useful to writers. They have software activation issues. Their tech support is useless. You’re better off practicing your touch typing ability unless you have a disability that makes software like Dragon a necessity.

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