This is my last post using Dragon Naturally Speaking 11.5 Premium. (I am compensated for this review. Click here for details.)

For almost two years, I’ve been blogging by talking to my computer using my trustee Bluetooth Plantronics Calisto headset and Dragon Speak. At the bottom of each post, you can see how many words were in the initial draft, as well as how many errors Dragon Naturally Speaking made.)

We’ve had some good times. I’ve dictated 60 posts and over 74,000 words to my computer. During that time, Dragon voice recognition software misunderstood 1804 words and made an additional 592 capitalization or punctuation errors. Sounds like a lot of mistakes, but what does that all mean?

Well, for me, Dragon Naturally Speaking correctly transcribed 97.6% of the words correct. (If you include the capitalization and punctuation errors as well, then Dragon speaking was accurate 96.8% of the time.), That number is pretty good (and pretty consistent with what I got in November last year.)

This means that for every 100 words that I say to my computer, DNS only gets two and a half words wrong. Wow. If my students got 97.6% on test, they’d be pretty happy.

So, why am I saying goodbye to Dragon Naturally Speaking 11?

Because today (August 3, 2012), Dragon Naturally Speaking 12 became available for digital download, and I just bought it. (Physical shipment of the box won’t start until August 15, 2012. If you’re looking for the Dragon education discount, sorry, but Dragon Naturally Speaking 12 student / teacher version isn’t shipping until September 7, 2012.)

I can’t wait to see how much more accurate Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 is compare to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11. If you visit the what’s new in Dragon Naturally Speaking 12 page on the official nuance website, the first feature is that the software is “even more accurate,” but they’re talking about out-of-the-box accuracy. I’m not sure if we’ll see much of the performance improvement for regular voice profiles, but we’ll see.

 

How accurate is Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 / 11.5 Premium

Here are some graphs to see how Dragon Naturally Speaking improves over time with actual use based on 60 blog posts and 74,000 dictated words.

The following figures are in the same order as my last Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 review in November 2011, which was based on 25 blog posts and 34,000 transcribed words.

1. Dragon Naturally Speaking still gets around 97% to 98% of the words (compared to November 2011 results)

2. Dragon Naturally Speaking still seems to improve over time (Compare with Nov 2011)

3. The capitalization and punctuation errors still consistently drop Dragon Naturally Speaking accuracy by around 1% (See Nov 2011)

4. Longer blog posts still do not necessarily mean more speech recognition mistakes (Compare with Nov 2011)

5. Does Dragon Naturally Speaking become more accurate with more use? (See November 2011)

This blog post was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking premium and Microsoft Word.

• There were 504 words in the first draft of this post.
• Dragon Naturally Speaking made 6 word errors which mean that it transcribed 98.8% of the words correctly.
• The voice recognition software also made an additional 8 punctuation errors meaning the total accuracy rate was 97.2%.

Click here to find out more about the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Education Discount.