Due to my disability I have had to persist with any idiosyncrasies that exist with either product. Fortunately I have found that in most cases the SmartNAV complements NaturallySpeaking's weak points. Add a pre-emptive on-screen keyboard & I have a work around for any of the bugs that either product has, or at least the ones that I have found so far
. Please excuse my enthusiasm but anything that helps me get back on to a computer and away from daytime TV is worth being enthusiastic about! I use NaturallySpeaking Professional version 5, version 7 is out now which is claimed to be 15 percent more accurate & compatible with more Windows software. For most people the standard or preferred edition will be more than enough & a lot cheaper. If your disabled or have reduced lung capacity, and therefore either quiet or broken speech, then I would recommend that the professional edition. NaturallySpeaking takes about 15 minutes to train initially & another 20 to 30 minutes after a couple of days of use. Its voice recognition gets better the more you use it & correct the mistakes it makes. These days I reckon that I'm getting 85 to 90 percent accuracy & including corrections a typing speed of around 50 words per minute! I know that Dragon claim a typing speed of 160 words per minute for NaturallySpeaking but when creating a document I just can't think that fast! At best before I broke my neck my manual typing speed was around 25 to 30 words per minute and that was not counting time for spell checks. NaturallySpeaking automatically spells everything correctly.
I use a wide variety of programs & haven't found one, excepting some free games, that NaturallySpeaking cannot control or enter new data into. Certainly all the Microsoft Office professional programs & other mainstream titles work fine. The NaturallySpeaking command set takes some time to get used to but an easy way to deal with this is to print the commands out and tape them to the side of your monitor for ready reference. A highlight of NaturallySpeaking is how it operates on the web, far quicker than using a mouse and keyboard, all that needs to be done is to speak a link to take you to a new page! There is a bug in version 5 where the software doesn't respond when filling in some web based forms. SmartNAV & an on-screen keyboard solves that problem. Some recommendations for using the software are as follows.
1 GHz processor & 512 MB of RAM minimum, a good quality USB headset microphone (too much electrical interference using soundcard driven microphones), an on-screen keyboard (the Microsoft one is okay, a better one comes from Lake software). Start NaturallySpeaking before any other program, except the natural point software, it won't work otherwise. You will need to be persistent and continue using NaturallySpeaking even if it is initially frustrating.
The main drawback for all voice-activated software on the market is mouse control. NaturallySpeaking uses a voice command grid system that works okay but is very slow & ended up driving me mad. After trying several different systems that allowed head movement to control a mouse pointer on-screen I chose the SmartNAV, better and cheaper! It works very well in either dwell-click mode or for creating documents I use the SmartNAV with dwell click switched off & spoken mouse commands for NaturallySpeaking. This avoids the aggravating experience of the dwell clicker changing the text insertion point all the time. NaturallySpeaking and SmartNAV really do complement one another very well for a disabled or injured user.
Not much else to say apart from free yourself from the keyboard & buy it.
Good luck, Sean