Computing has been with us for so many years now that it’s become a part of us. Think about your daily routine and how your phone and PC have become an integral part of your lifestyle. Setting an alarm, taking a photo, communicating via WhatsApp, checking into Facebook, ordering takeaways, doing some window shopping or getting into the nitty gritty of your work day – these have all become digital processes. In that time, we’ve seen MP3 players go from boasting 32MB storage for music (30 minutes of good quality digital music replay) to mainstream cellphones with a storage capacity of 1TB (1 million minutes of good quality digital music replay).
Processing and storage power has come a long way and this has been brilliant for resource-intensive products like speech recognition. Dragon’s minimum specifications will enable you to install the product on your machine and get some use but we recommend giving your PC the power it needs to help you fly. Think about it – every time you dictate something, your microphone is recording that sound, Dragon is “listening” to that sound wave, coming up with the best possible combination of words given the context, transcribing your utterance into text and then deploying onto the page.
Given a split second to be accurate, “type” the words and then drop them into screen – it’s going through many processes in order to achieve higher levels of accuracy compared against your unique voice profile. If you were dictating to someone, they wouldn’t be able to keep up as accurately as Dragon can because the PC processing power remains constant and doesn’t tire from listening and interpreting. We should probably cut it a bit more slack.
Just like our brains tend to work quicker when we’ve got the nutrients, rest and resources, computers require the same care. Except it’s a whole lot easier when you can simply plug-and-play or buy one off the shelf with the right specifications. Dragon’s legacy products are starting to be phased out, so if you’re planning on upgrading your operating system environment to Windows 10 or 11, now’s the time to start thinking about Dragon Professional Individual 15.
When it comes to memory, we recommend 16GB or as much as your PC can host. Dragon is an umbrella application, so it sits like the Dragonbar over other windows making it tricky for the system to keep up. Having extra memory just makes it easier for Dragon (and you) to flip between pages or windows. Right now, we recommend an i7 processor if possible. Otherwise, an i5 will do the job. There’s a consolidation of processing power happening, which means that Ghz on the newest models are much more efficient than they were. In either case, aim for 2.0Ghz + and if you’re able… a solid state drive will also enhance your computing and speech recognition.