Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

A chain saw injury to my left forearm, prevented use of my keyboard. I am a fast touch typist and became extremely worried about loss of productivity and communication with clients by email. This program saved the day. The key to successful use is to take the time to train the program by hearing your voice and being willing to train it through more than one reading session. Once that is done, it types as fast as I can speak and with just a few glitches. It crashed on me a couple of times, but by reloading it, the program came back to life. There are enough reviews out there on Dragon that I won't bore with what has already been said, however, the only thing that is frustrating about the program is its "living in too many worlds at once". First and foremost it should be a dictation/typing machine. But it wants to go on steroids and try to do all sorts of computer functions for you. The only problem is that there is not a functional wall built between the two worlds. For instance, it will open programs for you (such as Word, IE, Google Chrome, Excel, etc) by saying "open" , followed by "Word". And it will keyword search in the same manner. What I found happening is if I am dictating something that has the word "open" within the body of copy and if I hesitate at all after the word "open" then the program pops up a dialogue box asking what I want to open. Frustrating and time consuming to correct it. I found this happening on several occasions where it went to action command instead of typing. It sometimes gets confused in the correction mode, where you ask it to correct and it does not respond appropriately to the "correct that" command. So its helpful bells and whistles can sometimes be a source of irritation. But at the end of the day, I would highly recommend this program to anyone who would like to free themselves from carpal tunnel tendencies. It works extremely well and in some instances it has made me laugh. In my frustration on occasion, I would spout off and say "you freakin piece of ****" And it would try to type that, which brought a chuckle and then I would say "quit mocking me" and of course it would, by typing that. I also had problems with the Dragon headset microphone rig and got messages "microphone undetected", when plugged into my computer since the sound card and the headset were not seeing each other. Tech support suggested I switch to a USB microphone, which I did and problem was solved. I did not like wearing the headphone set anyway, and bought an inexpensive Logitech desktop microphone and it works wonderfully. The Logitech also has an on and off button at its base so you can control it without putting Dragon to sleep. Important to control the mic, if you answer the phone when it is on...it will keep typing anything you say. For those of you out there who might become frustrated with the program and wish that it performed up to expectations, and might not get the satisfaction from their technical phone support.....be aware of an extremely helpful web resource which is a forum for users, which may provide solutions to problems that tech support does not provide. Go to speechcomputing dot com (speechcomputing.com) and explore topics (problems encountered). One of the experts on that site was a former Dragon employee and wrote earlier versions of the software for Naturally Speaking. I found some very good tidbits of advice on the site. And they have experts who are moderators on the site, who will respond to your questions. Don't give up. Because there is reward for persistence.