This is the second blog post in a short series about Dragon Disaster Preparedness. You can find the first post here. Disaster Just over a year ago my hard drive failed. I had just purchased a brand-new computer less than two months before, but the SSD drive gave up the ghost. That means that my […]

As with many of my blog posts, this one is inspired by a question I was asked: “Will I be able to use my Apple AirPods as a microphone for Dragon speech recognition?” If you are very curious about the results of my experiment: jump to the Conclusion of this blog post. At that point […]

Recently, Brad asked a question in the comments of one of my blog posts. “How does Dragon deal with homophones?” That’s a great question and in fact the speech recognition sometimes has difficulty making the correct decision. What are homophones? Homophones are words that have different spellings and different meanings, but that sound exactly alike. […]

Greetings! The New Year is almost there. Do you have any specific plans for 2019? Me… I don’t really connect new starts to the calendar, but to be honest I do get always kind of excited about the start of a new year. It’s like taking a peek into the future and seeing all possibilities […]

Even though Thanksgiving isn’t a European holiday, I do take a moment today to think about what I’m grateful for. Somewhere after being grateful for my loved ones and good health, I’d have to mention the Dragon speech recognition software. Dragon allows me to work even when my minor health glitches make it hard to […]

Earlier this year I was interviewed by Neil Ball of The Entrepreneur way. I don’t think I shared the podcast interview via the blog, so here it is. Very belatedly, but the content isn’t time sensitive. There’s a bit about me, about my business and about speech recognition, of course!      

There are some topics that divide opinion. Topics that create a debate. The ongoing conversation about whether to leave one space or two at the end of a sentence is one of them. In this post I’m going to tackle this issue to see if we can find a solution. Who is right and who […]

If you’re anything like me, you probably have done this many times: install a piece of software and then… just start using it. No tutorial or course, perhaps not even reading the quick start guide. Personally I have done this with Photoshop Elements. Whenever I’m not sure how to go about it, I will just […]

What is NaNoWriMo? NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and it is actually an international non-profit initiative to encourage people to write a novel. Every November, many people start out writing their novel in 30 days. And by many people, I mean MANY. In 2017, over 400,000 people joined NaNoWriMo. Amazing, isn’t it?! Find […]

As I am sitting here, writing this, we are experiencing record-breaking high temperatures. Yesterday, on my way back from client, I caught my dashboard thermometer displaying 37°C, which is equivalent to 98.6°F. I was extremely grateful for the air-conditioning in my car! However, neither my office, nor my home office are fitted with proper climate […]

How secure are speech recognition applications? A couple of months ago I read an article in the Dutch media about Alexa, Amazon’s smart home assistant, sending a random conversation from someone in the USA to a random person in the owner’s contacts list. I found an article in English covering the same story at the […]

Dragon stinks! Some time ago someone enquired in a forum after speech recognition software. But only a program that actually works! “Not Dragon, Dragon stinks!” When I hear someone say that, I usually wonder what went wrong in the relationship between that person and their Dragon. Didn’t they ever hit it off? Did they fall […]

I had a fun experiment with Dragon: Recently there was a bit to do about a digitised sound sample saying either “Yanny” or “Laurel”. Watch this video to see how Dragon transcribes that particular sound sample and how Dragon transcribes a regular human voice.

NOTE: New developments -> New blogpost with even better news 🙂  Read all about it in this blogpost of 23 February 2019! Sometime last year it became impossible to properly work in Firefox with Dragon. The existing plug-in/extension stopped working. Apparently Mozilla decided to change something essential in an update to Firefox, causing the Dragon […]

Dragon may seem a wonderful solution on first sight. And in most cases it can certainly be absolutely great. But there are several considerations to keep in mind. What do you need to successfully use Dragon? Important success factors include yourself as the end user of the software, your computer and the microphone. You: the end user […]

It seems so convenient: just talk to your computer and it will do what you say. Much easier than use the keyboard and mouse, right? Perhaps you’re a bit older and never learned how to work with a computer. Or perhaps you have serious physical issues preventing you to be able to use a mouse […]

Is there such a thing as an Ultimate guide to Dragon NaturallySpeaking? Let me explain how I came to this question: If you have read my bio, you know that I have been a trainer for speech recognition software for almost 20 years now. However, I have a confession to make: running an international online branche […]

I’ve had incredible fun singing a Christmas song to the Dragon 🙂 . It’s amazing what you can make the speech recognition do if you have a bit of patience. Click video below: Merry Christmas to you!

[post updated 6 January 2019] Do your own more than one computer? If you do, you are probably interested to know whether you can install Dragon on both your laptop and your desktop computer. I frequently get asked if it is allowed to install Dragon speech recognition on multiple computers. When can I install Dragon […]

Recently I got this question: “What is the single most important factor for success with Dragon speech recognition?” All right, that is a question that’s really hard to answer. In my opinion it is simply not possible to indicate a single success factor. What is the most important factor? Without a computer, you cannot use […]

It is a question that I get regularly: “What if I get a cold? Can I still dictate and use speech commands in Dragon? Will Dragon understand you? Obviously, if your voice is really hoarse or you’ve lost your voice completely, Dragon won’t work anymore. But even if circumstances are less dire, Dragon speech recognition […]

Workld Emoji Day; I didn’t know it was a ‘thing’, but I’m happy to show how I dictate emoji’s in Dragon speech recognition software.

I am an entrepreneur: I run a speech recognition training and consulting business in the Netherlands and have been self-employed for over 7 years now. Like many enterpreneurs and emplyees alike, I am fairly busy most of the time and sometimes I am BUSY. Perhaps you know what I mean :-). Are you busy too? […]

Generally speaking, the term ‘speech recognition’ in technology describes the capability of an electronic device to respond to words spoken by humans. Nowadays there is speech recognition for Windows and Mac computers, smartphones, GPS navigation systems and much more. At Learn Dragon Online, I teach people to work with Dragon Professional Individual. This is a […]

This month it is 20 years ago that Dragon NaturallySpeaking by – then – Dragon Systems was ‘born’. It was the first speech recognition product that allowed you to dictate continuously. Its predecessor DragonDictate required you to speak word-for-word. A much slower process where every word was analysed and recognised  separately. Not until Dragon had finished […]

I created Learn Dragon Online to help people get the most out of Dragon speech recognition software. Why a course on Dragon? While speech recognition software is not rocket science, it still can be tricky to get Dragon to do what you want. I find that many people struggle to get adequate use out of […]

Update: This blogpost was first written when I started my site and didn’t have a proper ‘About me’ page in place. I now have one, and you can find it here. About Janneke den Draak This is the first time that I have created an international website and most probably you’ve have never heard of […]