The Challenge: Dictating documents without a keyboard

The solution: Dragon NaturallySpeaking

For slow typists, creating long documents or sending detailed e-mail messages can be a challenge. If you're on the road, it's even more difficult. You usually don't have easy access to your keyboard; and even if you did, it would be impossible to use it as you drive your car, walk between locations, or do other tasks that require your full physical attention.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could simply dictate to your computer or PDA?

You can. But many people don't know about the speech recognition software that comes standard in the latest version of Windows. While it does a pretty good job, it's far from perfect, and needs substantial training. So you might give up quickly.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is an add-on software that you can use on your desktop system or on your PDA. In addition to a highly accurate speech engine that runs on your desktop, this package comes with a speech recording application that runs on your Pocket PC or Palm device. So you can carry it on a plane to transcribe while you're on the road.

Like Microsoft's integrated speech recognition software, you need to train Dragon, which you can do by reading interesting chapters from popular books. So don't expect to open the box and use the product.

Once you're past the training phase, you'll be able to reduce your typing load by using Dragon when you have large typing jobs. While its recognition is not perfect, recent versions are quite accurate, and mistakes are easy to correct. Members of the medical and legal professions should opt for the special editions created for their specific fields of practice.

The street price for Dragon NaturallySpeaking hovers around $99 (although I've seen it as low as $40 online). Expect to pay $700 to $800 for the medical and legal editions.