Ready to Write? NaNoWriMo with Dragon Speech Recognition

(A message from the fine folks at Dragon Speech Recognition)

Committing to write at least 50,000 words in one month is a challenging (but somehow daringly alluring) feat. It can be done, as tens of thousands of authors – including some New York Times best-selling novelists – have proven over the years. How can you transform your fledgling storyline into a complete novel in just one month?

Successful authors have the creative imagination to generate a world beyond reality. The ability to paint extraordinary pictures in their minds and conjure life-like characters that seem like old friends. But for some authors, it’s difficult to transfer those ideas into written words. They’re great storytellers, but may not be great typists. Their thoughts and ideas are trapped in their heads because they can’t type fast enough to capture them on paper. It’s happened to you before, hasn’t it? Just as you finish typing one particularly difficult-to-spell word, you’ve completely lost your train of thought. The flow of the dialogue you were trying to capture dries up, and you find yourself staring at a blinking cursor.

But what if you could eliminate the frustration and inconvenience – and often painful ache -- of typing? What if capturing your thoughts was as easy as speaking them aloud? That’s what writing is like with Dragon speech recognition: you talk and it types. Just speak all 50,000 words of your novel and watch the text appear on the screen as if by magic.

With Dragon speech recognition, you can write a great novel in one month:

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  Stop Typing, Start Talking: Focus on the content of your writing rather than the mechanical distractions associated with typing and spelling. Dragon understands what you say and how you say it. Simply speak words and they appear on the screen -- with no typos.
 


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  Express Yourself: Transform ideas into text at the speed of thought; don’t let typing or spelling slow you down. Convert your thoughts into words just by talking, it’s that simple!
 


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  Avoid Pain and Injury: Reduce the amount of painful keystrokes and mouse clicks you’ll log this November! An author that types 40 words per minute presses 12,000 keys per hour or 96,000 keys per 8-hour day. With Dragon speech recognition, authors can simply dictate text at speeds of up to 160 words per minute, eliminating the need to touch the keyboard at all.
 


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  Say It, Do It: Tell your computer what to do, such as “Search Google for NaNoWriMo pep talks,” and it does it. Dragon understands and obeys your voice commands. It even gets to know you better over time – including the specific words that you use – so recognition accuracy keeps increasing.
 


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  Use Your Favorite Applications: Regardless of whether you use a Mac or a PC, Dragon can help you capture your novel within your favorite word processing application -- using just your voice.
 

For more information, visit our NaNoWriMo page today and shop our special offers!

Were the "buy" prices listed on DragonSpeak's NaNoWriMo page the special offers? I've no doubt it's a great product, but it's priced too high to be of use to me... darn it.

Just a heads up for anyone who hasn't tried them before, and I don't want to sound like I am badmouthing them, so I'll admit the version of the product I used was three or four years ago and I am sure they have made some improvements.
But I tried dragon speak and found that it didn't work very well... I had to turn the mics sensitivity up in order to get it to respond to me, but then it would interpret my breathing as various long voweled words. And it took hours to go through the 'training' where you speak so it can learn to recognize what you are saying, and still didn't seem to work very well; I had to constantly retype things by hand. I eventually gave up.
Even if they have improved their product significantly, I would suggest you find a trial version before purchasing it for the price they are asking.
(Yes I am ranting because even though I bought it second hand, I spent hours and hours for an entire weekend fighting with it and eventually gave up and threw the program disc out)

I've been using the native speech-to-text in Windows Vista and Windows 7 a lot recently because lots of typing aggravates some tendinitis problems I have. It's not bad, but I have gotten to the point I need something with more muscle and a better recognition percentage.

I tried Dragon about 10 years ago (it was still Dragon Dictate then, I think), and was really disappointed. but the reviews on their latest version (11) and the one prior were very complimentary, so I've decided to give it a try again. As to price, I was about to give up because I need the functions of the Premium edition and $199 is much more than I can handle. I found that version for $95 on Amazon about a day ago, and bought it for about $107 with tax and shipping included.

Keep looking around, there are some deals on the product that bring the price way down, without having to qualify for an educational/academic discount.

Cheers,

mC

If you haven't tried it in a few years... give it a go. I have the Dragon app on my ipod, and it works very well! Speech recognition technology has improved a great deal in the last several years (especially compared to the decade-ago versions.)

I have also bought the Dragon App from the Iphone store and it works just great. As an App it only cost around 2 € and it enabled me to "write" while traveling or being not in front of my computer. You can later copy the text written by the program into a mail and send it to you for copying in your word document. Dragon is an excellent software.

I use them and they are a great product. Unfortunately, I cannot use them to write my novels with. I find that my start/stop type of writing doesn't work very well. When I'm doing stream of consciousness type writing(chatting, writing blog posts or music reviews) it picks up my words and makes almost no mistakes.

I don't use Dragon for my noveling because I can get my words from brain to fingers much faster than I can from brain to mouth when I'm doing this kind of thing, but I use it for writing emails and letters to people when my arthritis is acting up. It's improved *drastically* from earlier versions, even a few years ago, and I really can't believe how accurate it is using my MacBook's internal microphone.