I’ve finally given in and purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking preferred version 9.5. I only needed an upgrade because I have version 8; however, it’s cheaper to buy the full version from PC World or Amazon than to buy the upgrade from Nuance. It was the little things like apostrophes, capitalisation and dictating brackets that got to me in the end.

NaturallySpeaking is so much better than Windows Speech Recognition. I’ve started from scratch with a new speech profile, hardly giving it any training, and already it’s much more accurate than Windows Speech Recognition ever was. As far Windows Speech Recognition Macros is concerned, I’ve always had this facility in Dragon NaturallySpeaking with Vocola and NatSpeak, and now I have them running under Vista.

I’m still a bit peeved that I had to pay the price of the full version instead of getting a decent discount for buying an upgrade. Just to be clear, the full version costs £145 from Nuance or £100 from PC World or Amazon, and the upgrade from version 8 to version 9 costs £100 from Nuance.