Five winning stories will be selected by a panel of judges, and the winning entrants will each receive an Amazon Kindle 2 as well as Dragon NaturallySpeaking upgrades for three years.
While trying to complete my Masters Degree at Liberty University I found myself working 65 plus hours as a new COO of a mental health organization and had to find time to somehow complete my Masters Thesis in order to graduate on time. My old method was that I would complete several rough drafts and rough those drafts even more before I was able to complete the final draft before having to get my wife to have mercy on me and type it for me. I had not taken typing in school (I was/am a hunter & pecker). This process usually took me about three weeks but I only had two weeks left to get it all done and submitted before the end of the semester. I don't need to tell you how stressed out I was; there was no light at the end of the tunnel it seemed and I knew that I could not sacrifice work hours because we had just opened a new office while at the same time preparing for National Accreditation. I was at wits end and was even beginning to show signs of depression due to the long hours of work and trying to work on my paper. My family life and work was beginning to suffer due to lack of sleep and stress and then I was checking my e-mail one day and saw an add for Dragon Naturally Speaks, which really caught my attention. I began to feel a sense of hope so I did more research on the product and even called and chatted with someone in customer services that explained how the program worked and how easy it was to setup and use. I was suddenly feeling like I actually could get my paper done but still was somewhat skeptical because I didn't want to build myself up for a huge let down if this Dragon Naturally Speaks program did not work as advertised (was it tooooo good to be true?) but I said "What the heck! What do I have to lose but the price of the program", which was an introductory sales price from Office Depot.
Long story short, I bought the program and installed it and went through the training sessions, which took about 45 minutes total before I felt comfortable enough to begin dictating with it (I was using version 8). I was able to take my final rough draft and dictate my Masters Thesis with correct citations and full bibliography in four hours with only about 10% errors, which were corrected easily and mostly instantly. The total process took me six days from rough draft to final Masters Thesis completion, in fact It ended up being over 40 pages including graphs, statistics and charts. While dictating I was able to expand upon my thoughts from the rough draft and dictate them into the paper.
Results: I got an A and was able to graduate in time and I owe it all to Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaks.
I have since used Dragon Naturally Speaks Preferred 9 to complete my Ph. D. in Health Care Management and Policy and continue to use it daily.
P.S. I now use Dragon Naturally Speaks Preferred at work and most of my staff have seen me use it and have since purchased it for their use in documenting therapy notes and other documentation for work and personal use. We all especially like being able to dictate into the digital recorder and uploading it into Dragon where it is immediately transcribed (preferred version 9).
Thanks Nuance for such a wonderful and affordable product.
Barry W. Graham, Ph.D.