NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4

There's always been some cynicism about speech recognition, and not without reason. To get useful levels of recognition required a hefty initial investment of time and although experienced users could give impressive demonstrations on their PCs, these were hard to replicate after you actually loaded the software into your own computer.

The biggest hurdle new users had to face was the rite of initiation: introducing the computer to your own voice. This could easily stretch into an hour-long session before you were ready to dictate, and the first results were usually quite poor. Philips FreeSpeech 2000 (reviewed issue 61, p198) managed to cut recording time to 15 minutes, translating to a total training time of around 30 minutes, but Dragon goes one better. Once you've installed the software, and providing you have a speedy system, you can safely expect to spend just ten minutes between putting on the supplied headset and beginning your dictation.

Impressive figures, but these would be meaningless without good recognition accuracy and Preferred 4 doesn't disappoint. Although reading a long paragraph threw up quite a few mistakes, it reproduced several of the shorter sentences flawlessly. What's even more amazing is that most of the mistakes the program made were due to my own mumbling or unfamiliar words. While further training can go only a little way to help NaturallySpeaking understand your occasional mumbles, unfamiliar words can be easily dealt with by adding them to the program's already extensive vocabulary. It's also worth noting that this vocabulary is our very own British English, so if you say 'Kevin Keegan is a Geordie', NaturallySpeaking will understand you.

Like all voice-recognition software, Preferred 4 improves with further training and Dragon has made it easier to make corrections that will be added to your voice profile. Most important of these is the Select-and-Say method, where the Select command flags your queried word and automatically starts the Correct window.

This doesn't mean the software is perfect. Even when I tested NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4 on a Pentium III/500 computer with 128Mb of RAM, it struggled to keep up with the pace of normal dictation. In this respect, Philips FreeSpeech 2000 performs better, with near real-time speech-to-text conversion.

Installing NaturallySpeaking Preferred 4 on to a Pentium II/266 with 64Mb of RAM made the program's need for speed even more obvious. In fact, it can't even take advantage of Dragon's latest technology, responsible for the huge reduction in training times, for which the company recommends at least 64Mb of RAM and a 300MHz processor. However, if you're going to spend £111 on the latest speech-recognition software, it makes sense to upgrade your system - ideally to a Pentium III or Athlon, as NaturallySpeaking can take advantage of SSE or 3DNow! instructions - in order to take full advantage of it.

Unfortunately, having concentrated so hard on the inner workings of the product, Dragon hasn't made the user interface any more friendly. After the optional quick tour, which demonstrates such things as basic dictation and correction techniques, new users are faced with Preferred's uninspiring and plain Notepad-style interface. At least Dragon has made a concerted effort to integrate with Microsoft Word, where two recording/editing and playback toolbars add themselves to the Word interface, allowing you to start dictating with a single click. You can also dictate directly into most other programs, but unless these have been customised for NaturallySpeaking you won't be able to use the editing features.