Dragon NaturallySpeaking 3.5 Preferred Edition
Pros: Good alternative for someone with poor typing skills, or who prefers to concentrate on what they are saying, rather than what they are typing.
Cons: Lengthy set-up, accuracy rate needs improvement.
NaturallySpeaking would be the perfect program for lots of business users — if the accuracy were only better. The idea of dictating to the computer rather than searching for that pesky “p” on the keyboard is appealing, but the program falls short of its promises.
Set-up is simple, but lengthy. To achieve a high level of accuracy, you have to dictate about 30 minutes of text to the computer as it learns your voice inflections and measures background noise. It asks to examine a word processing document to look at your sentence structure and asks you to pronounce words it doesn’t recognize. Once this is done, you’re ready to start.
You can work in the NaturallySpeaking window to dictate text, or it can be used in other programs, such as Microsoft Word. Using the included headset that plugs into your microphone jack in the computer, begin talking. While other reviewers claim 95 to 98 percent accuracy, I found it to be more like 80 to 85 percent, or, in other words, about two of every 10 words will need some sort of correction. Making corrections is easy and done by voice. Tell the program which word to select and repeat the word or spell it.
The problem was that when it didn’t recognize what I was saying, it often didn’t recognize my correction either. I found myself saying a phrase, trying to correct it by repeating it, then trying to correct the correction, which is frustrating and slows your dictation to a crawl.
If you are a terrible typist and would rather spend your time correcting between 5 percent and 20 percent of all the words rather than keying the entire document, this program is for you. For the rest, I recommend waiting until the technology develops to a high accuracy rate.
GoBack 2.1
Pros: Innovative idea, a cheap way to protect your data.
Cons: Requires 10 percent of hard drive space to operate.
GoBack by WildFile is a great idea. It creates a GoBack Drive using about 10 percent of your hard disk space to create a version of your hard drive from an earlier time. This means you can “go back in time” to retrieve files that were accidentally deleted, or rebuild your entire hard drive to a time when everything worked.
How many times have you wished you had never installed that new software or hardware that screwed up the computer system? With GoBack, you can typically go back as far as a week, depending on your system, and reset your system to the way it used to be.
The interface is fairly simple to use. In case of massive failure, there’s a screen that appears before your system boots that allows you to access GoBack if needed. Otherwise, you access files through Windows, and call up a list of everything that is recoverable.
I had no problem recovering multiple file types after they had been deleted from my system — and yes, that included being emptied from the recycling bin. The program isn’t infallible — there was one occasion where a Word file could not be recovered.
If you’re willing to part with 10 percent of your hard drive to use as a safety net, GoBack is a great addition that can eliminate a lot of frustration.
Todd Shryock ([email protected]) is SBN’s special reports editor.