I have partial paralysis to my left extremities, so typing
is a challenge because I have no finger dexterity on my left hand. I used to be
able to type by touch at around 50 wpm, but now I rely solely on my right hand
and I am constantly looking at the keyboard as I type. Although I use all 5
fingers, my speed is still just around 25-30 wpm, and I tend to hit a lot of
wrong keys while looking back-and-forth from the keyboard to screen, which means
I’m heavily relying on the backspace key.
So, while I was studying medical transcription, I searched
for and decided on a speech recognition program, Dragon Naturally Speaking. The
first time I ever used any speech recognition program was back in the mid 90’s,
and the program was a total pain to use. I found it better to one-finger
hen-peck the keyboard than to try to write anything using that frustrating thing.
The program constantly picked up nonsensical words, about 70% of the time. I’ve
lived in the California since I was 7 years old, and after 39 years, I really
doubt the problem would be any lingering accent.
Anyway, I had originally purchased the $99 Dragon
Naturally Speaking Premium Version 11 from Amazon. I was impressed. I cannot
say that I was completely thrilled with the product. But, compare to the speech
recognition program I used prior, it was several hundred times superior. It
still needed some tweaking though, but honestly I cannot say that the problem
was all because of Dragon.
To start, I had to purchase a new laptop because Dragon
would not load in my old laptop, purchased in 2001, it did not have enough
memory. I bought and loaded Dragon onto
my new laptop, completed the initialization setup, had my headset that came in
the package on, opened up MS Word and started. Fifteen minutes later, I was at
the point of picking up my new laptop and fling it across the room, but
patience acquired by age prevailed, and I just shut everything down and had ice
cream. Dragon was picking up what I was saying very well, but the frustration
was that after a sentence or two, I would see that tiny twirling circle (that I
would come to hate) telling me the program was working on something. So, I
waited. Twenty seconds later the words appeared. I said another few words and
waited again. Every time the wait became longer and longer, until that circle
of frustration just kept twirling endlessly.
Thank goodness I had the help of a vocational rehab
counselor who was familiar with Dragon. After a couple of training sessions and
the continued lagging from Dragon, we decided to upgrade the version of MS Word that came with my laptop, get a noise-reducing
headset and upgrade Dragon to version 12. After all the upgrades, everything
worked amazingly. Dragon is continuously learning from every use. I had
uploaded medical documents and Dragon would scan through them and add to its
vocabulary. Dragon would also learn how I pronounce words, which came in handy
on those really long and tongue twisting medical terms. Overall, Dragon is a
great product but you really need someone familiar with it when you run into
trouble. It really saves you a lot of frustration. I think Dragon is great! Overall, it is a wonderful product especially
for individuals with paralysis.
However, although I would use Dragon for
repetitive reports, translating documents and transcribing dictations, but I
still personally prefer typing by hand when I am writing articles from scratch.
It’s just easier for me, especially because, creating and typing is such a
stop-and-go and deleting process for me. I think it’s mainly just a habit for
me. I just have a hard time trying to think of what to write and dictate it at
the same time. It’s very distracting for me. So, I still prefer and rely on
one-handed typing. Look for my review on one-handed keyboards in the future.
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