As many of you know I've been suffering from tendonitis off and on for the last nine months. No matter how much I've restricted my typing it's still not getting any better. So I have finally bitten the bullet and decided to go out and buy Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I bought the version called "Preferred" because it allows me to type not only in word processors, but also in e-mail and, coincidentally, this blog as well. I thought you might like to hear what my experience of this product has been.
The last time I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking I was using version 6 and I found that it wasn't terribly good at learning how to understand my language. I spent more time correcting the entries that I did actually getting anything done. So I didn't have a lot of hope for this particular version but desperation won out. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the program did at picking up my speech this time. It seems that there have been a lot of improvements between version 6 and version 9. The program used my outgoing e-mails as a way to learn how I language and every time I make changes to the text that shows up on the screen it remembers that and saves it to a file. So effectively it is learning more about how I speak each time I use it. It's truly miraculous.
The customer service, on the other hand, has been dreadful. I had a problem installing the program where my original user profile was corrupted between the first time I used it and the second time I used it. Sadly I made the mistake of trying to install over the weekend in Dragon offers no support over the weekend so I was on my own until Monday. In going to the website to try to find out how to solve my problem, I found that a note that said that tech support would cost me $20 per phone call. For someone who just spent $200 on a program that wasn't actually working properly I found that to be a little outrageous.
On Monday I called Dragon. After 20 minutes spent on hold with the sales department (I was trying to circumvent the need to pay for tech support) the phone was answered by a woman in India who could not answer my question and in fact could not seem to grasp the concept that I had version 9 and not version 10 which was the most recent version. Another 20 minutes on hold to tech support yielded an actual response but halfway through my initial explanation of what was going on the phone cut out and I was cut off. Another 20 minutes later I finally got through to a second tech support person. He spent 40 minutes on the phone with me to finally determine that in fact my files were corrupted and could not be recovered and I had to just start over from scratch (something I had already done over the weekend when I could not get through to tech support because there was no weekend support available). At least he didn't charge me the $20.
Then it was another 20 minutes on hold again to customer service to get them to send me a copy of version 10 which I should have gotten originally but which was not actually being distributed through Staples yet. But then they told me that before they could ship me the new version, I would have to return the product I already had and pay the shipping costs. I told them that they should just be able to give me access to a download to upgrade and they said that that was not possible. I asked to speak to a supervisor and was put on hold for several minutes before the girl finally came back and said that yes they would ship me the new version; but I had to sign a piece of paper saying that I was going to destroy the version I had. I would have to fax that paper back to them along with a copy of my receipt before I could have the product shipped to me.
So in short, I spent two hours trying to fix a problem that I had already fixed and getting a copy of the program version that I should've gotten when I first purchased. I will have to spend another 10 minutes filling out this form and faxing back the receipt and the form before I will actually get the new version. So it's a good thing that the speech recognition program is so effective because I'm going to need to make up a lot of time to account for the customer service snafus. And that's all I have to say about that.
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Kelle Sparta is the author of The Consultative Real Estate Agent - Building Relationships that Create Loyal Clients, Get More Referrals, and Increase Your Sales, as well as being a speaker and trainer specializing in the real estate industry. Kelle is the founder of Sparta Success Systems, a real estate training company that provides tools, products, and training to empower agents and brokers to create lives and businesses they can love. For more information, visit her website at http://www.spartasuccess.com/. © 2008, Kelle Sparta.
My question is...did you write this blog with Dragon Naturally Speaking or did you type it?
I wrote it with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.