Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've already written two long reviews about Dragon Naturally Speaking products and I swore that I would never write another long software review. So much for promises in good faith. To give you the short executive summary - my previous experience with various DNS versions is that they are the most Janus-faced, trick-or-treat programs in the PC world, capable of astonishing dictation accuracy and speed, but a buggy mess that oftentimes didn't play nice with several other major programs in the PC world, and were sometimes impossible to install and uninstall properly. They are, to paraphase Dickens, the best of programs and the worst of programs running on PCs. They can save you an enormous amount of grief and cause an enormous amount of grief - I'm still not sure which polarity is truly ahead. Nuance also has a complete monopoly on good speech recognition, and this may be part of the problem. I had a pretty bad experience with attempting to install DNS 12 from DNS 11, which trashed my DNS 11 speech files after multiple attempts to update them to the DNS 12 format (and therefore I didn't use 12). This followed a mixed experience with DNS 11 - buggy at first but way better after the 11.5 patch, but I foolishly and naïvely hoped that Nuance had learned from their previous cascade of negative feedback to make DNS 13 a more user-friendly installation experience. I must have been smoking something to think that. . . I've just come from a five hour installation nightmare, with multiple failed installs despite "technical support" from Nuance. I put technical support in quotes here simply because I don't think the technical support person really knew anything that I didn't know. First of all, the install program would not uninstall the previous edition (DNS 11.5), and I had to download their executive remover software to get it completely off the system. Not only wouldn't the new program uninstall the old one, but using the Windows uninstall function also failed. Why an industrial-grade souped-up proprietary uninstall program is required to get rid of the old version is itself an interesting mystery and raises a lot of questions about program operation. How can a program be installed such that Windows can't uninstall it properly? I have no idea, but it does seem consistent with how a bunch of things seem to happen with Nuance DNS. This is not a unique failing, as other programs can be tough to get rid of, but a program that has sold easily 100 million copies of its last five versions?? Come on Nuance. That's really a sign again that Nuance is doing everything BUT sweating the details. Part of the problem may be simply that the core SR (speech recognition) program has become a swollen, bloated and HUGE base of code. Including loading user speech files, DNS 11 took longer to load than the whole operating system of Win 7 (over 3.5 GB by my calculation for both program and speech files). With that much code, it may be impossible to get rid of all the bugs. I've owned every addition since DNS 4 or 5, and it's become an increasingly larger program at each edition. To their credit, Nuance appears to have made a conscientious effort to trim the size of DNS 13 relative to the code base size of 11 and 12, but they have not addressed the buggy and finicky install process at all. I have to wonder therefore if the other operational weaknesses have gotten much attention. Getting back to the DNS 13 installation saga . . . . . It only got better - after finally successfully uninstalling the previous version of the program, and rebooting, the program still would not install - and indeed it seemed to fail in exactly the same installation point. The tech support person indicated that the solution was to turn off the Windows firewall (!!!) He insisted that this was part of their protocol. I asked him how often this was really thought necessary - he couldn't say. In any case, an unknown percentage of the time, installation of a product requires turning off a fundamental safety feature on your computer system? What?? Why is that necessary? What is it that Nuance believes that they need to do to your system, from the standpoint of turning off your firewall? I asked the technician this, and he could not answer, and just said that this step was required. I wondered what Microsoft (historically no paragon of concern for end-users) would say about the idea of deactivating firewalls to install software (invitation to a Trojan Horse?) and I thought I was in some kind of Kafkaesque scene at this point. As I listened to the tech support person diligently explain why this was just standard procedure, I did not hear a single legitimate reason for this other than that this was what he was reading off of some crib sheet/checklist. Well, against my better judgment I allowed the technician to persuade me that I should turn off the Windows firewall. I was not terribly surprised when this did not make any difference, and again it seemed to fail at the same installation point. The plot thickened from there. . . The tech support person then insisted that our next step was to modify the Windows start-up sequence, essentially disabling startup of most of the startup software. Not installing from safe mode, which would have been easier, but using MSConfig and manually disabling virtually everything in the startup sequence. When I balked at that radical a step, and asked if they still supported older versions of Office (2003-7) to determine if this was worth all the grief, he indicated that DNS 13 would not work with anything but the newest versions of Office (2010-13)! At that point,I decided that I had seen this modus operandi from Nuance before, and that it was best to simply withdraw from the install process. I later found out that not only would I have had to turn off much of Windows 7 on startup, but I would have had to roll back multiple Windows updates to get DNS 13 installed. Is this how good and reliable software is installed? I doubt it. And if this is required at installation, what other bugs has Nuance left in the program's operation? Fortunately, after some trepidation about a similar scenario that might block me from getting back to where I had started, I was able to successfully reinstall DNS 11.5 (had to reinstall the original 11 version and then the 11.5 patch which was time-consuming), and then I began the cumbersome process of trying to get a refund from their Customer Service Department. After a long wait on the phone, and some back and forth about why I couldn't use the program, and a sworn statement that I would remove it (they evidently didn't quite believe me that I couldn't install it so it didn't have to be removed!) the customer service person agreed to give me a refund, after informing me in solemn tones that "any use of the program would result in my being prosecuted to the full extent of the law for copyright violation." Now I was almost convinced that I had stepped into a Kafka novel - closer to the true ethos and operating logic of Nuance. After all this back and forth, I now have DNS 11.5 once again working relatively okay, just locking up and taking Word with it occasionally, (just as it was prior to all this), and all I've lost is 4.5 hours of my time. That was actually a huge relief, as losing this program would be a big setback. It is after all the best, and the worst, of programs, and when it works well, it's a godsend, and I couldn't function professionally without it for long, given how much writing I have to do. If you put this issue of poor installation debugging together with the well-documented history of other forms of buggy operation (trashing of speech files, difficulties with upgrades, crashing of the core program and associated lock ups of Office - see the dozens of Amazon reviews of NS11/12 about all these issues), it's an impressive and undeniable record of real trouble. The proof of this - if you're doubtful - is plastered all over the Amazon reviews of their products. it's a product with an impressive history of polarized reviews - many people love it, because for one reason or another the bugs and problematic interactions did not emerge on their system (lucky folks), while other reviews document major problems and very low marks. It's a mistake if either side in this debate sees the other side as 'wrong'. It's just different experiences, based on different computer systems with different existing software and OS bases. But the fact that a significant fraction of users have anywhere from major problems with the program to outright disasters speaks to the fact that the program is simply not adequately debugged. It's not 1% of the users either, it's a significant fraction who can't install 13, and again if you don't believe me, just look at what's on the Amazon website. Most damning are the negative reports when users have to deal with technical support or have problems and are looking for solutions from Nuance. I'd have to say that the cumulative record on Amazon in terms of user reviews in relationship to these types of situations is 75% negative. Here's my conclusion. Nuance may have a total monopoly on good SR, and the various more recent issues of DNS 10-13 may work flawlessly for some users, but Nuance does not know what they are doing. This is not to say that they can't create good or even great code. Although the technicians creating the code base have been successful in carving additional accuracy from the program Over its various updates, the executive management at Nuance can't admit or acknowledge (and therefore can't fix) the program's buggy installation process (or its many other bugs and operational quirks, which have persisted from version to version). What good does improved accuracy do you if the program can't be installed and uninstalled or upgraded without a lot of grief? Or if you lose your speech files, and have to start all over after years of training and teaching the program? Or if negative interactions with other common programs (or its own bugs) make the program unstable? It's possible that Dragon Naturally Speaking 13 is an absolute wonder - the best yet - when it comes to actually translating your voice into accurate text in a variety of applications. However, it's pretty clear to me that Nuance pays more attention to their press releases than they do to end-user reports. Previous versions would not work with Adobe Flash, Microsoft Security Essentials (which appeared to sometimes treat NS 11-12 as a virus, making me wonder what operating system rules it was breaking!) and would sometimes trash or at least nick a Microsoft Office installation such that Office had to be reinstalled every once in a while. Last but certainly not least, the program would sometimes eat its own user files, requiring that users go back to square one and teach the program from scratch (unless they saw this coming and made several backups - highly recommended to all you DNS users out there, as this has saved my bacon more than once). I don't know if they have rectified these other various problems, but I've decided I don't want to find out. And I simply can't afford to spend almost 5 hours installing a single program on a PC that works flawlessly all the rest of the time. I don't know what it will take for Nuance to change their approach, and create a more user-friendly installation process and debugged program, but I'm not optimistic, given that they have heard this complaint for years and it's clear that these basic and recurring problems are no better. This unfortunately is just as important a fact about the program as its impressive accuracy. It's a shame that Nuance operates with such impunity towards feedback from its core user base. With a major cleanup organized by someone within the software team who wasn't complacent but instead was paying attention to repeated user reports, this program could someday be just as great as Nuance says it is. UPDATE: Two days after all this, and after making a post in a Nuance forum to see if anyone else had any insight into the install failure, I got a message back from a SR trainer and beta-tester for Nuance, who confirmed what I had already suspected about the fate of the post - that Nuance essentially censored any post in their forums that cast Nuance in anything less than an ideal light. Instead of addressing the problem, validating the customers and their experiences as valuable data that had to be attended to, and thereby winning back any lost trust, their approach is to squelch dissent and negative press, rather than dealing with the underlying issues. What more can one say, and what could be more damning about the operations of Nuance as a large corporation??