I know we have had a few questions about this in the past but anyhow...

Does anyone use dragon? and if so what for?

I am getting into my final months of my funding. I have nothing towards my thesis written (apart from chunks of writing that are very separate to each other). And I was thinking perhpas speaking what I want to say would just aid the whole writing process - speeding up my scentences. There have been so many times when I think of something AMAZING, and then by the time I have got my hands around the keyboard, its gone from my mind.

Do people find it annoying i.e. with the training of it, and can you train it to use specialist terms?

This comes after spending ALL MORNING redoing my computer, deleting everything and takin git back to factory settings :-s

Sneaks, I would tread carefully with the Dragon Naturally Speaking software. It is accurate, but it takes a while to train and sometimes it just completely mistranslates you. Also, you need quite a nippy computer to take full advantage because otherwise it won't be able to transcribe at the speed you talk.

hmm, interesting. I was thinking about having a go on the windows voice recognition thingy thats free to see if I could use it or not. I know its probably not as good, but it would hopefully give me an idea?

Sneaks, that's crap as well. The best one is Dragon NS - by far. It's the industry leader or something. Don't get me wrong, it is good but just probably not the solution you think it is.

its my eternal quest for finding things that will make my PhD easier (and also be an excuse for not doing PhD hehe)

I'm severely disabled, and have the Mac version of Dragon (MacSpeech Dictate) because I lose control of my hands so frequently. But I find it difficult to use, mainly because I'm a history student, so it can't cope with obscure words and spellings I need. Often it's more work than a help.

I also have the problem that I have great ideas which I can't type up quickly enough. My solution to that is to record them, speaking into the computer, and recording them directly that way. Then I replay them back, and type them up. It's amazing how great the ideas can be generated that way. Typically I will have forgotten almost all of it, and am rather impressed by what I said!

Absolutely not
I am a Masters Student and use it extensively. It saves me significant time

I have not experienced many problems - if any
The ontly things - be careful with plural words it some times comes up as
"plural is" instead of "plurals" for example

The training as a drawback is over stated. Unless its accent sensitive?

I couldnt recommend it highly enough

IMPORTANT
When you buy
buy it through Amazon.co.uk - and you can get it cheap because you are a student or a teacher

Truely, It will save you so much time
Just make sure you read through it also

I've written a about 20000 words using Dragon NS, and I think it's great. Yes it needs training, but it doesn't take long, and the training is ongoing, meaning it gets better and better. It's easy to teach it specialist words. You can even get it to read some text (previous chapters, essays etc) to pick up new vocabulary.

I just sit back in my chair, and dictate my words of wisdom. Can't recommend it enough.