My clients never cease hearing my endless refrain of “the right tool for the right job” for I am fanatic about efficiency. Is Dragon faster, or is the scroll wheel on the mouse faster? These are questions that plague me constantly. The answer always is: “that depends”.
However, when working in Microsoft Outlook, and I find myself buried deep down in my inbox, I find it much faster to say “go to top” to reposition the cursor focus to the very top of my inbox in order to view the latest email. Conversely, if I am at the top of my email, and realize I need to reply to something that is at the bottom of the list, I say “go to bottom” to reposition the cursor focus.
Bottom line: if I have to scroll more than twice with my scroll wheel, I have already wasted time where Dragon can perform the task infinitely faster.
Legal practitioners were one of the first to embrace speech recognition many years ago. They became disenchanted with Dragon when they realized it could not deliver the accuracy that they desired. However, this was in the past. And like any software application, fine wine, and most technologies, Dragon has steadily improved with age. In fact, as a software fanatic such as myself, I’ve never known any software application to make the steady leaps and bounds that Dragon does from version to version.
