I’ve been covering speech recognition solutions for some 13 years and if there is one consistent message in almost every article that has left my machine are that there are no revolutions, only evolution in this field. That means that nearly new product or version of it is better than the previous one, making the technology easier to use and deploy, thereby enabling to steadily supplant more traditional and less efficient ways of interacting whether by live agents or pounding a keyboard.

That’s where Nuance comes in with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11, a new release of its speech recognition software, one that has been around for 13 years, that has been redesigned to let people spend more of their energy working and creating, rather than clicking and typing.  Dragon 11 says Nuance, “gives people a voice to perform almost any task on the computer to create documents, send e-mails, surf the Web, search Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter and interact with their favorite applications – at speeds up to three times faster than typing.”

Here is what is new with Dragon 11:

*          An improvement in accuracy of 15 percent compared to Dragon 10.  This means Dragon 11 recognizes speech more accurately right out of the box, so people will spend less time correcting recognition errors. Dragon 11 is also faster than previous editions when selecting application menu items by voice or executing voice commands

*          Time-saving voice commands and shortcuts. Dragon collapses common multi-step tasks on the PC into direct voice commands. One can send e-mails and schedule meetings, search the Web for information, search their desktop, or even navigate between Windows, simply by saying what they want. 

Dragon 11 includes even more commands to consolidate multiple mouse clicks and keystrokes into a direct voice command that can be spoken anytime, such as: “Search Amazon for Bluetooth headset”, “Search Twitter for haiku” and “Send an e-mail to wife to buy Dragon 11”

*          New user interface. The latest release of Dragon makes it easier than ever to speak one’s mind and communicate more naturally with. There is a new Dragon Sidebar to help users discover and remember commands and tips, a richer help system with new tips, illustrations, tutorials and videos and an updated toolbar that allows users to discover and quickly access important but often-overlooked Dragon features

*          Smarter correcting and editing. Dragon makes editing and correcting text easy. With Dragon’s Quick Voice Formatting commands, one can issue a simple voice command, such as “Bold New House Listings,” or “Capitalize Today’s Featured House” to make formatting text faster than ever.  With Dragon 11, it’s easy to edit or correct a word or phrase if there are multiple matches by displaying a number next to each.  In addition, corrections entered using the keyboards (in addition to those made by voice) are used to adapt the user’s profile and boost accuracy. Finally, the Correction Menu now suggests more alternate recognitions by default and enables users to quickly add phrases to the vocabulary, or to prevent an undesired word from being recognized

*          Recorded audio transcription. Now this is a feature that will make journalists like me buy this product if nothing else. With Dragon, one can dictate on the go into a digital voice recorder, and then let dragon do the work for a quick transcription of your recorded voice.

Also, creating a new user profile for a digital recorder or PDA, or adding a digital recorder as a new audio source for an existing user profile, is now much faster with Dragon 11: the minimum reading time required to train Dragon with a recorder has been reduced from 15 to 4 minutes. In addition, people can use .DS2 (News - Alert) files directly to train Dragon to create as well as to transcribe dictation from portable recorders

*          Enhanced hardware and software support. Dragon 11 is compatible with Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 2010 applications and full text control, menu tracking and natural language commands are supported for Word 2010, Outlook 2010, and Excel 2010. With Dragon 11, users can now comfortably view the Dragon user interface and tutorials on netbook (mini notebook) computers. Finally, Dragon 11 supports OpenOffice Writer with dictation, correction, selection, and playback

“Since Dragon first debuted over 13 years ago, it has truly transformed from a novelty to a necessity for millions of people,” said Peter Mahoney, senior vice president and general manager, Dragon, Nuance (News - Alert).  “Speech has proven itself – on the desktop, on mobile devices, and even in cars – to be a more natural interface, allowing people to simply speak to keep up with their ideas, their communications, and their work.  Our goal with Dragon 11 was to make the software not only as accurate as possible, but almost transparent, empowering people to focus on simply letting their ideas flow, straight from their brain to the page.”