Is Dragon faster than the world touch-typing record? This article attempts to answer the question, ‘how fast is Dragon?’
One of the claims that’s often made for Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition is that you can talk faster than you can type.
This depends on the speaker and the typist, of course. Some tobacco auctioneers in the southern states of America have been clocked at up to 450 words per minute, although this is with a very limited vocabulary, consisting mainly of numbers.
Typing speeds vary considerably; somebody who has never been trained and may only use a few fingers to ‘pick and peck’, won’t be as quick as somebody who has been trained as a touch typist, using all fingers and not having to look at the keyboard to know where each key is.
A ‘pick and peck’ typist will probably only manage around 20 words per minute. Typical business typing speeds are around 40wpm, though professional career typists can exceed 100wpm, repeatedly. The world typing speed record is 212wpm, on an ergonomically designed Dvorak keyboard.
The Results
I average 120 words a minute, so I’m not as fast as the world record, but I am comfortably faster than a professional typist, and six times faster than a pick and peck typist!
At normal dictation rates you might only hit about 100wpm, but that’s still two and a half times the average typing rate.
Why is speed important?
Well, obviously, the faster you can create a document, the more you can do in a day. If typing isn’t one of your core skills, dictating is going to prove a lot quicker.
If you type at around 20wpm, a 1,000 word report is going to take you a minimum of 50 minutes. If you can speak it at, say, 100wpm, it’ll take around 10 minutes, giving you 50 minutes to do something else.
Accuracy
Dragon is now very accurate!!
As well as the ease of being able to speak what you want to write, you gain from not needing to correct spellings. Dragon uses a vocabulary of correctly spelt words, so you don’t have to worry whether its ‘conciet’ or ‘conceit’ or ‘seperate’ or ‘separate’. You may have to check the occasional ‘to’, ‘too’ or ‘two’, but in most cases the software will work this out from the context.
Depending on how much typing you do in a day, this kind of saving could be repeated again and again, so you could end up saving hours.
What else can I use Dragon for?
It’s not just reports or articles you can save time on, as Dragon can be used with most popular email clients to create the 20 or 30 emails a typical office worker sends in a day. You can control formatting in Word too, by issuing commands as well as dictation within the program.
You can also use Dragon to give voice commands through Windows to online services such as Google. Even in the middle of dictation, it’s quite possible to speed research with commands such as ‘Search Google for paper suppliers in Birmingham’ or ‘Open top site for local weather forecast’.
This usually proves much quicker than opening your browser and typing a request into the search box.
This post is a summary of a recent article by Simon Williams, the full text is available here…
http://www.itproportal.com/2015/03/10/can-dragon-speech-recognition-beat-world-touch-typing-record/
