Classroom Teacher

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium vs Dragon Home / Professional 15 Review

Grade 8 Teacher

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium vs Home / Professional 15 article LAST UPDATED: Tuesday, September 29, 2020 – Yup, I still use Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a regular basis. (I just used Dragon Home 15 to dictate my responses to some comments. I spoke my comments into Microsoft Word first before copying and pasting these comments onto this website.)

NOTE: If you still use Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13, it’s time to upgrade to the latest version of Nuance Dragon voice software. I haven’t used Dragon 13 Premium in forever because Dragon Professional 15 is more accurate right out of the box. FYI – make sure your computer exceeds the minimum requirements for Dragon and turn up the accuracy setting. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask below.

Screenshot of Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 comparison by product. View the comparison matrix (PDF) from the Nuance website.

This post is about Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium (and older editions) vs the current version (Dragon Home 15 and Nuance Dragon Professional 15)

If you’re brand new to Nuance Dragon voice-to-text software…

Nuance no longer updates Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium. They only offer Nuance Dragon Home 15 and Nuance Dragon Professional 15.

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium vs Dragon 15 Table of Contents:

PRO TIP: When I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking with Google Docs or Google Slides, I tend to dictate my notes into DragonPad first. Then, I copy-paste my words into the Google doc. (I do this if I have a lot to dictate like when I was writing these 21st-century learning lesson plans. If it’s just a phrase or two, I’ll get lazy and dictate directly into Google Docs.

About using Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 15 and Professional 15 with Microsoft Word

Yes, you can also use Dragon software to dictate directly into Microsoft Word. You have all the same capabilities that you do with DragonPad. For example, you can correct mistakes, select key sentences, and apply formatting.

I feel like when I was using Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13, I got pretty frustrated trying to dictate into Word directly, so I started using DragonPad instead and it became a habit.

But now, seems pretty good. I’m going to have to experiment more with Microsoft Word and Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 15

Can I still buy Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13?

You can still find Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13 and other versions on eBay and Amazon, but I wouldn’t get it.

Here’s why:

Here is Nuance’s official note saying goodbye to Premium. In a nutshell…

Difference between Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13 and Nuance Dragon Home / Professional 15

Off the top of my head, here are 3 differences that I would care about:

1. Nuance Dragon Home 15 and Nuance Dragon Professional 15 seem to be more accurate than Nuance Dragon Home 13

I have to make a few calculations, but anecdotally, it seems like Nuance really did make some improvements in the voice engine for Nuance Dragon 15. This is talking about how a brand new voice profile seems to make fewer speech-to-text mistakes right out of the box. (Calculations pending.)

(Generally speaking, I didn’t find significant improvements between previous versions of Nuance Dragon voice software (i.e. for example, the jump between version 12 and version 13)

2. It’s easier to fix mistakes in the new version of Nuance Dragon Home 15 than the old Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Home.

They changed things up when they updated Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Home to the latest version, Nuance Dragon Home 15.

It’s now easier to fix mistakes in Nuance Dragon Home 15:

This is a big improvement in their Home product. Before, you needed to get Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium or Professional in order to get this advanced editing / correction feature.

Now, all versions of Nuance Dragon 15 make it easy to listen to your voice playback to fix mistakes and remember what you said.

3. Nuance Dragon Home 13 allows you to create and save multiple user profiles.

The newer version of Nuance Dragon Home (15) does NOT allow multiple user profiles. They took away this feature.

(Or, at least made it a lot harder to have separate user profiles in Nuance Dragon Home 15. Hint: If you had multiple user profiles in Nuance Dragon Home 13 and upgraded to Nuance Dragon Home 15, those separate user profiles exist and work.)

You’d have to get Nuance Dragon Professional 15 if you wanted the latest version of the software that allows for multiple user profiles and user management directly from the menu options.

Difference between Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home 13 vs Premium 13 vs Student 13

2019 UPDATE: Nuance no longer seems to offer an educational discount. Read this post.

The following information was first published in 2013, and is kept up for archival and reference purposes.

So, you’re thinking about getting Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but you’re not sure what’s the difference between Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home vs Premium vs their Student versions?

No problem. We got you.

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a speech-to-text voice recognition software for your PC. You talk, and the computer listens and types down what you say.

Sure, you can also control your mouse, search for things on the internet, or send emails, all without touching a keyboard, but I don’t really use any of these features. I just write blog posts with it.

For the past few years, I have been using Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium.

Overall, I find the speech recognition is excellent. It gets on average 97-98% of my words correct when I am dictating in Microsoft Word. This means, on average, I only have to correct 2 or 3 words for every 100 words that I say.

Before you continue reading, please note that I am compensated by Nuance for my reviews of Dragon speak naturally.

What does this mean, exactly?

Not sure what’s the difference between Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home vs Premium (or Student/Teacher) editions?

Here are some things to know:

1. Dragon NaturallySpeaking comes in four different editions:

The average person only needs to decide between Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home vs Premium.

If you are a medical or legal professional, you can speak with specific medical or legal vocabulary sets, as long as you are using Dragon software versions for those industries.

2. Dragon NaturallySpeaking “PREMIUM” comes in a couple of different flavours:

If you want Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium, then you can choose from any of the following different types of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium:

  1. A physical shipment costs $199.99
  2. A digital download costs $199.99 (headset not included)
  3. Upgrading (to a new version) usually costs $149.99 (Upgrading to Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13 is no longer offered as Nuance is encouraging everyone to upgrade to Dragon Professional Individual. Goodbye Dragon Premium!)
  4. The student teacher edition costs $99.99 (digital download, so headset is not included)
  5. The wireless edition costs $299.99 (Plantronics Callisto Bluetooth headset)
  6. The dictate anywhere mobile version costs $299.99 and you get a Philips digital voice recorder

All of these different packages of Dragon NaturallySpeaking premium come with the exact same software. The only difference is the price you pay and what audio device / hardware you get bundled with the software.

In other words, Dragon NaturallySpeaking student/teacher education edition is exactly the same as Dragon NaturallySpeaking premium.

3. Difference between Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home vs Premium / Education? What do I need?

(Remember that the student/teacher version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the same as Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium so we can just focus on the difference between Dragon NaturallySpeaking home and premium editions.)

Here’s a quick summary from the Dragon comparison chart on the Nuance website:

The following features are not available in Dragon NaturallySpeaking home. (You’ll need Dragon premium or educational versions to do the following:)

What’s the difference between Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13 and Professional 13 editions?

By the way, if you’re wondering what’s the difference between Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium and Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Professional, you get the following three features in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Professional:

How accurate is Dragon NaturallySpeaking Voice Software? Does it really work?

Most of the blog posts on this classroom technology site were written using Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking with a 97 to 98% word recognition accuracy.

Here’s what I do:

  1. I turn on Dragon NaturallySpeaking and do the audio checks to make sure the microphone is positioned correctly and so the voice recognition software can adjust volume settings.
  2. I turn off most of the background processes on my computer (i.e. Dropbox, one note, etc.)
  3. I ask my cat to leave. No, seriously. Here’s why.
  4. I write my first draft using Dragon NaturallySpeaking with Microsoft Word on my Windows machine. Right now, I mostly use my USB headset.
  5. I talk to my computer, and then at the end of the post, I check for transcription errors.
  6. If I read something that doesn’t make sense, I move to that sentence and use the playback command. (The playback command is only available with Dragon NaturallySpeaking premium. It is not available with the Dragon NaturallySpeaking home edition. Click here to see the Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Feature Matrix PDF for more information.)
  7. As I corrected Dragon NaturallySpeaking recognition errors, I keep track of the number of word errors and punctuation/capitalization errors that the voice recognition software made.
  8. At this point, I am done with my first draft, so I upload it to the blog, and I make revisions, fix the formatting and images/links, etc.
  9. At the bottom of each post, I include the total number of words in the original draft of the post, the number of word errors, punctuation errors, and a few examples of mistakes. (This paragraph isn’t included when I calculate the number of words in the document.)
  10. Sometimes, as I go through this process, I make changes to the original draft. I might change my wording, add or delete sentences, or otherwise revise my work. I do all of this tweaking in WordPress (Google Chrome) so that’s why the total number of words in the final draft might differ from the total number of words I calculate the accuracy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Here’s what I don’t do. A few things to note:

There are a few things you can do with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, but I personally don’t.

1. Even though you can control your entire computer using your voice only, I really only use Dragon NaturallySpeaking for dictation.

I would rather use my mouse and keyboard shortcuts to control the computer because I find it quicker. (Having said that, if you’re using Dragon NaturallySpeaking because of a physical impairment, you should know that you’re able to control your computer with just with your words.)

The keyboard shortcut that I use the most is the plus sign (+) to turn the microphone on and off.

2. Right now, I’m not using the Bluetooth wireless headset that I got with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I use my own USB headset.

It’s pretty cool using a Bluetooth headset to talk to your computer. You feel like you’re talking to a computer in Star Trek. When I first got Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Premium, I got the wireless version and I loved it: “pace around and do other things and our words magically appear on the screen.”

There have been a few times when I’ve been connected to my computer with my USB headset and I’ve just narrowly escaped breaking my computer when I walk away. (The phone rang, you rush to get it, crash!)

Note: On my Windows 8 machine, I have no problems with the older BT300 Calisto headset that came with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11. But right now, when I can’t get the new enhanced bluetooth BT 300 II calisto headset to work properly. (You can dictate just fine, but when I try to correct mistakes with my voice, Dragon NaturallySpeaking seems to lag or hang.)

3. I don’t use Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking to surf the net.

In fact, I’ve disabled the Dragon NaturallySpeaking plug-in for Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

When I first used Dragon NaturallySpeaking, if I went to YouTube or another video site, Internet Explorer would crash and say that the Dragon NaturallySpeaking plug-in was not responding.

This would happen to me, even if Dragon NaturallySpeaking wasn’t turned on. (Just with the extension installed in the web browser.) I don’t surf the net with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, so I just disabled the plug-in.

4. Right now, I’m not correcting my mistakes using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking commands.

This goes against the basic training rule I’ve heard from people who teach students to use Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking: the more you train Dragon by correcting your mistakes (with your voice), the more accurate Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking gets.

Over the past two years, I dutifully went back and corrected mistakes using my voice, trying to train Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I would give commands like “correct that” so Dragon would know when it heard me incorrectly and would do better next time.

But right now, I have a theory that Dragon NaturallySpeaking works really well straight out of the box and in the classroom situation, students correcting in a noisy environment might actually make their user profile worse.

(In fact, a recent blog post I wrote with a brand new Dragon NaturallySpeaking user profile with NO training correctly transcribed 98% of the words.)

So, this post you’re reading was originally written using a brand-new user profile with absolutely no training. And, if you click here, you see that it’s actually quite accurate: Dragon NaturallySpeaking got 98.3% of the words correct.

After this little experiment is done, I probably will go back to correcting my mistakes and teaching Dragon in my quiet office, but for right now, it’s neat to see that Dragon NaturallySpeaking is incredibly accurate without any training whatsoever.

(Note: the only time I might train Dragon NaturallySpeaking right now is if I had to teach Dragon a new word with a unique pronunciation like a student’s name.)

Here’s a list of posts that I wrote using Dragon NaturallySpeaking

So, now that you know a little bit of how I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, here’s a list of posts that I use Dragon with.

Over the years, I’ve used Dragon with different audio devices: Bluetooth headsets, a USB headset. I’ve also used different versions of Dragon (11, 11.5, 12, 12.5, 13, 15) on different versions of Windows.

You can use the search tool to see how accurate the Dragon voice software is. You can filter by audio device, version, date.

THIS FEATURE IS COMING SOON! STAY TUNED!

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Summer Sale 2013:

I recently got an email from Nuance (July 2013), the people who make Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition software, letting me know that they are having a summer sale.

It’s a pretty good deal, so if you’ve been waiting to buy speech recognition software, now is a good time to check it out:

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Summer Sale 2013 promotions:

You can now save $40 on Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Home Edition 13.

Save $60 on Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13 for Windows

Finally, if you’re a teacher or student, you can save an additional $40 off the sale price by getting the Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Education Edition.

Difference between Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium vs Nuance Dragon Professional Individual 15 and Nuance Dragon Home 15

John’s a pretty frugal guy.

A few years ago, his options would have been:

In 2019, John’s options are:

And for what John needs (which is just talking and writing down what he says), Nuance Dragon Home 15 is probably enough. (Not Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Home. See below.)

I’ve used all 5 Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking versions listed above. (I started with the Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Premium wireless version 8 years ago and just kept on upgrading from there.)

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium version is no longer updated by Nuance, so between Nuance Dragon Home 15 and Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium

The big quality-of-life feature you got with Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium was the ability to playback your speech when correcting documents.

When I want to correct something, right now I just say, “play that back,” and then I can quickly correct the mistake.

Why is this a big deal?

Here’s the Nuance help page where it compares the features in Dragon NaturallySpeaking between the Legal, Professional, Premium, and Home editions.

Here’s a screenshot of the PDF. You want to look for the section called advanced correction / editing to see the difference between the Premium and the Home editions:

One reason why you might want to get Nuance Dragon Professional 15, instead of Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium.

That’s because Nuance Dragon Professional 15 can save synchronized audio which means you can listen to the original dictation (and correct / train your audio profile) on a different date.

Or, more accurately, John can focus on talking and blogging, and when we get together, I can use his audio files to improve his Dragon voice profile. (In an ideal world, John would just save his work and fix the transcription errors on his own. But, let’s be real. I’m going to end up doing it.)

Here’s a copy of the DragonPad file that I made using my Nuance Dragon Professional version. (I saved it a few days ago, and then life got busy and I didn’t get around to fixing my transcription errors that recording session.)

Dragon saves a “.dra” file along with the transcribed text file.

With Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Premium, you can’t save your audio with the text file, so once you close your file, you’re out of luck.

Click here to see the help file on the Nuance website to see the Dragon feature comparison showing this key difference between the two. (You’re looking for the section called transcription tools.)

Yes, I know there are other big differences between Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 15 Individual and the cheaper Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium 13.

But for John, the big thing is just being able to blog with his voice. That’ll make his life a lot easier.

And the cheaper Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 will do that for him.

(It does mean, I can’t easily help John train and correct Dragon because it won’t save his audio file, but personally, with Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13, I found it was anywhere from 96-99% accurate, anyway.)

So we’ll see how things go with John as I get him to dictate when we get together to work on his blog.

Aside: John isn’t completely new to voice dictation.

One day, maybe I’ll get John a wireless headset and that’ll let him walk around. It’ll probably make him dictate a little more naturally, as John is a walker.

But, my personal bias is I find the USB headsets just to be a little bit more accurate when I dictate, but I’m sure this is my impression and not reality.

Also: John, when you read this, remember you have a 30 day cancellation

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional Individual 15 was 96.92% accurate in transcribing this blog post

I talk, it types for me. Overall, in the first draft, there were 1561 words and 48 errors made by the voice dictation software.

I used DragonPad and just talked out the entire blog post, saved the file, and then went back and fixed my mistakes (to help train my Dragon voice profile and get it used to me.)

Hmm. I wonder how many spelling mistakes the average person makes. If it’s more than 3 mistakes per 100 words, then in this case Dragon Professional Individual 15 would win the accuracy race.

Mistakes that Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking made:

If you look at the table below, you can see the kinds of mistakes Dragon made.

I said:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking heard:

He has a lotIt is a lot
He probablyIt probably
when he’s typingwhen his typing
helping them outHelping him out
Literally time to turn downliterally tell him to turn down
I’m sure he’ll getI’m sure hope get
We were probablyWe are probably
try to get it to worktry to get work
Internet Explorer or Google ChromeInternet Explorer Google Chrome
get himget them
why I wentwhy went
writing is paragraphswriting his paragraphs
for himfor them
talking and getting his ideastalking get his ideas
Dragon NaturallySpeakingDragon naturally speaking
and those probablyIn those probably
  
just so that we could haveJust that we have a
Chances are the software’s probablyChances are this offers probably
I tried to teachI try to teach
that it suggeststhat is suggests
Dragon to learnDragon the learn
We usedwe use
Immediately copyimmediately copied
Google DocGoogle talk
It seems likeSeems like
I lookI looked
I’m gonnaI meant
when we get together to work on his blogwhen we get to go to work on his blog
John isn’t completelyJohn is in completely
he textshe taxes
iPhone and he just saysiPhone he just says
, but it’s just the iPhone, but assist the iPhone
I find isn’t as accurateI find is and as accurate
and that’ll let him walk aroundand thou let him walk around
My personal bias is I find…My personal biases I find
Just to beJust be
DragonPad x4Dragon pad

New vocabulary I taught Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking from the writing of this post…

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