<p>Any family out there have a positive experience with dictation/voice recognition software for college work? We are looking at Dragon Naturally Speaking but the reviews we're finding are 2008 or earlier. </p>
<p>Advice welcomed!</p>
<p>I use Dragon every day for medical dictation. It’s pretty good but more time consuming than just dictating. One has to edit pretty carefully as it can’t use context to differentiate between similar sounding words (to/too/two/2 for example), and when editing, one tends to fly over the words that look OK and later discover that the entire phrase was not OK.</p>
<p>Don’t know how it would work with college stuff.</p>
<p>I’ll bump up in the hopes there are others who have opinions or experience.</p>
<p>My husband also uses Dragon. He said it gets easier the longer you use it. It does come up with some funny stuff, though! Proofreading is critical, lol.</p>
<p>College lectures in my experience are rarely long enough or fast enough to make dictation software worthwhile. I’ve known a few people who used those electronic pens that record your notes as you write them and then you can dump the info into your computer, that would be a lot more helpful. You’ll rarely find it useful to reproduce the whole lecture verbatim, even if dictation software can type it up for you. What you really need is your own notes either produced on computer directly or put in later. If your child has an LD that makes it hard to take notes, most colleges will let provide them with other students to be notetakers for them.</p>
<p>Oh, I thought the OP intended for the software to be used for typing papers, not recording lectures. Dragon wouldn’t work to record other people, because it has to be “trained” for the way one person speaks.</p>
<p>The site is slow today.</p>
<p>D uses dragon and has used it for years. The longer you use it, the easier it gets and the smarter the program gets. But, you still need a good word processor to run it through for spelling and grammar issues. She does her papers on it and also uses it for in-class essays in a separate room. Nobody can read her work. </p>
<p>She still takes the papers by the writing center (most colleges have these) to be edited, as any student should. She’s been able to do excellent work and achieve her A’s this way. </p>
<p>She uses a PC, and we have also, recently, purchased a computer with a tablet and “pen” which is fantastic. she takes her lecture notes on the tablet and the pen is amazing, as well, and the notes are turned into text for her. She can draw diagrams and even integrate the notes with the blackboard notes the profs post, as well as slides. I’d actually recommend it for non-dysgraphics, just as a way to organize work, though it is somewhat expensive.</p>
<p>If you have questions about using this with a Mac, I believe there is a poster named Shawbridge whose son is using a Mac and has found some other solutions, as well. You could contact him.</p>
<p>Feel free to PM me if you want more 411.</p>
<p>The latest versions of dragon naturally are much better than previous ones and work very well. However if you have Vista or Windows 7, it is a built in feature and that one works very well too.</p>
<p>I too have a Fujitsu Lifebook tablet and love being able to take notes and have them converted to text. And while I have neat handwriting my boss has abysmal handwriting and it can even figure out his notes :)</p>
<p>Thanks everyone!</p>