

In our tests, the Typical Complete installation took about 10 minutes. Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 Professional is easy to use, beginning with a short and painless installation via CD-ROM. All editions of Dragon share the same engine. Home users should opt for the $99 Standard edition or pay $100 more for the Preferred version, which enables dictation playback and transcribes to handhelds. Dragon performs better than we anticipated, but the Professional version is painfully expensive, gobbles up memory, and charges high rates for technical support.

Its transcription and networking features should serve business users and legal pros well. It can learn your speech and writing patterns in order to deliver impressive, professional results. Dragon offers intuitive speech commands and lots of hand-holding to spare you from intimidation. It fills a need for PC users who can't or won't use a mouse and a keyboard. Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 voice-recognition software lets you use voice commands to produce text documents and surf the Internet, thereby minimizing your typing.
