We have decided to start a new segment regarding gadgetry and the law. If there is a gadget that you would like reviewed that you think would be beneficial to lawyers or law students, or you would like your own gadget reviewed, send us an e-mail and we’ll see what we can do.

Preface: I will be writing this entire blog post with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. I will not be correcting anything, even though it is relatively easy to do so. I feel that this will give you a better idea for what to expect out of the box, so to speak. Okay, I was lying a little bit when I said that I would not be correcting anything. The truth is that Dragon NaturallySpeaking sometimes does not like to put spaces after periods, and if I let it continue doing that, it will drive me crazy.

As you can see, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 voice recognition is fairly accurate after only a few minutes of training. I type faster than most people, but this is certainly transcribing faster than I type.

Positives:
1. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 works quite well in Parallels for OS 10.
2. If you are simply brief in a case or brain dumping and don’t care very much about misspellings or simple typos, this can be a very useful tool.
3. It doesn’t require any kind of special microphone. I’m using this $16 microphone that I purchased on Amazon, which seems to work quite well.
4. When Dragon NaturallySpeaking does misspell a word, taking the time to fix the misspelling actually does help. For instance, as you can see above, it thought that when I said briefing, I actually said brief in. Once I corrected that misspelling, here’s the result: briefing briefing briefing briefing. Not bad, right?
5. Dragon no longer requires the stupid “dragon pad” in order to function, and you can at least transcribe in any window.

There are some negatives:
1. Dragon NaturallySpeaking does not work wonderfully with Microsoft one note. In particular, it refuses to write in any heading area. Additionally,creating lists and boards (that was supposed to save bullets) is very difficult.
2.there is relatively poor interaction with Microsoft Word. In particular, the word correction dialog seems to break constantly.is common to say “select that” only to see no dialogue appear. This is acceptable when you simply want to brain dump, but when you’d actually like to improve the word accuracy, this is a troubling result. The reason for this is that as you correct misspellings, you are actually training the program to better recognize your voice
3. you should almost forget about case names. Watch: Rove V. Wade… oh, well that’s actually an interesting result. sherbet versus Werner. Sturgis versus Crowninshield. you get the idea. We can really hold this against Dragon because surnames are difficult even for humans. With that said, We hear that there is a legal version available, and we are looking forward to reviewing that in the future.
4. Complex commands. there does not seem to be any kind of cheat sheet for the massive amount of commands that are available in Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. At this point, I can’t even remember how to start making a list. it would be very useful if the software came with an instruction PDF the likes of Pages ‘09.

as you can see, the voice-recognition may actually be useful to you for certain tasks though it certainly will not be replacing professional journalism anytime soon. If you get the opportunity to give it a test drive, we recommend it. in order to give it a fair assessment however, make sure you go through the initial training.

All in all, we give it 4/5 Larry’s.

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