RSI-Relief

This is a bit of an old link, but I just found it so it’s new to me. Jon Udell, a comumnist for InfoWorld magazine provides a demonstration of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 in action. He captured a short screen video of himself actually using Dragon to dictate a column. It’s fascinating to see how well the program actually works. He speaks more or less naturally, and the program understand him extremely well, making only a few mistakes over the course of several paragraphs.

The video also shows the editing features of Dragon. This capability works pretty well, but is considerably more clumsy than the dictation part. It looks like it would take some time to become accustomed to the editing commands.

As Jon writes, this program is not yet much good for programming, and dictation is definitely slower than typing. But if you can no longer use your hands, or if you just want to give your fingers a break once in a while, Dragon NaturallySpeaking appears to be a very viable alternative.