Dragon NaturallySpeaking For Dummies, 4th Edition

Introduction

Finally! Someone has freed you from that medieval torture rack, the keyboard, and its contemporary accessory, the mouse. You’ve been muttering epithets at your computer. Now you can actually speak to it. Although it still won’t take your epithets to heart, it will now at least write them down for your future convenience.

For those who can’t type or spell (or at least, not well), and for those whose bodies have been punished by keyboarding, Dragon NaturallySpeaking spells relief (and other words, too). NaturallySpeaking gives your lips their job back: being your principal data output device. In fact, with NaturallySpeaking, you may be able to type faster with your lips than with your fingers. At the same time, you can eliminate spelling errors (and spell checking) from your life. Yes, it’s true!

NaturallySpeaking can do great things soon after you open the box, but too often, its talents lie hidden. Recognizing speech is one of those human talents that is still very complex to a computer. Recognizing human speech is as much a miracle for a computer as computing the precise value of pi is for a human. (Computing the highly abstract value of pie, oddly enough, is much easier for a human.)

NaturallySpeaking borders on being miraculous, but to get really practical results, you have to meet this miracle halfway. Perhaps you have been wondering what all the excitement is about, either because you are thinking of getting NaturallySpeaking or because, so far, NaturallySpeaking ...