Voice Recognition: Still Striding Forward

Late last summer, my wife put ScanSoft's (now Nuance's) Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional v8 through the review wringer and delivered a thumbs-up analysis. We haven't found time yet to fire up the version 9 update which recently arrived, but Ars Technica did and pronounced it a worthy upgrade, bestowing a '9' (out of 10) rating on it. My friend Lisa, a many-generation Dragon veteran, is also running Dragon v9 now and agreed with Ars's generally upbeat observations. One warning, though; the program gobbles up lots of RAM. Lisa tried to run it on a Windows XP-based system with 512 MBytes of RAM and experienced first-hand the performance-clobbering outcome of vigorous virtual memory paging.