Dragon's Speach Ware Plagued by Bugs

I would like to be able to tell you that I am writing these words without touching the keyboard. I would be happy if I were dictating into a microphone and the words were appearing on the screen as I said them, thanks to Dragon's NaturallySpeaking Deluxe software. Unfortunately, however, I am among the 25 to 60 percent of the NaturallySpeaking customers who cannot get the program to work on my PC.

For those lucky customers for whom it works, the program allows you to speak at a normal conversational speed. If the program types an incorrect word, you correct it with spoken commands. The program learns from mistakes and adjusts to user speaking patterns. It may be useful in the field of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) because it accommodates an unlimited number of different users-each with a different speech pattern.

But luck was not on my side. After installing the software and dictating a standard paragraph, my voice provided "unacceptable speech quality." Technical support, which is not toll-free, told me that I needed to buy a higher quality sound card for my Dell computer. After $95 and more aggravation it turned out that I was one of the unlucky ones who could do nothing to improve the speech quality. Dave, in technical support, told me that my sound card was receiving high frequency interference from components such as the CPU and hard drive. Dave said that if I could shield the sound card from those components with my modem, it might improve.

I asked Dave how many other customers had this problem and he said, "I'd have to say that about 25 percent are like you and don't work at all." Then Dave added that about another 35 percent of customers had problems due to combinations of incompatible components and frequency interference. To confirm, I asked, "So you mean that only 40 percent of NaturallySpeaking programs work directly out of the box?" Dave said that was true. He said that even technical support at Dragon Systems had similar problems.

If Dragon Systems can get beyond their technical problems they will have a groundbreaking technology.

Before saying goodbye, Dave's last comment to me was that he hoped I would keep my new, $95 sound card even if I had to return Naturally Speaking because he felt that higher sound quality improves the multimedia experience.