Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have long looked at voice dictation software and been disappointed. I am a professional writer and the possibility of dictating my work at least in draft form has always been so appealing that I tried every generation of voice dictation software going back to the early 1990s. I received NaturallySpeaking 9 last night and captured the screen cast of the out of box experience. While I did not achieve recognition in the upper 90th percentile, I did achieve recognition significantly better than any I have seen before in previous generations. Fans of voice dictation have long said that, "if only you train the application for a few weeks, you can achieve quite practical levels of recognition. " I imagine that's true, but I've never had an initial experience positive enough to make me try.with NaturallySpeaking, the out of box experience is so good that I am willing to continue working with the application. While I do own a hefty system, dual processors and a few gigabytes of RAM, unlike the other reviewer I've had a very positive experience using only the motherboard's onboard sound. I won't give it five stars, because I do think that Nuance is overstating the recognition statistics out of the box: while it's extremely good, better than anything I've seen, it is not, for me, only one or two words in 100 that I need to fix. I've dictated this review, and made around five corrections. Several paragraphs were recognized flawlessly. Given that I type 90 words per minute I think that I would've been able to type this review in approximately the same amount of time,but for slower typists, or for those of us who occasionally dictate documents into recorders for later transcription, I believe that NaturallySpeaking has reached a tipping point and is worth the money.