Word Perfect Bundle

Last Modified: January 14, 2000

(Editor's note: This topic was originally written in February of 1998. Some of the information may be out of date. Although Dragon has maintained WordPerfect compatibility in all of its new products, I am not personally aware of the state of any current relationship between Dragon Systems and Corel.)

At the beginning of February 1998, Dragon Systems announced a broad partnership with Corel Corp. to integrate Dragon NaturallySpeaking with Corel WordPerfect 8, and eventually the entire Corel WordPerfect suite.

Initially, Dragon announced that Dragon NaturallySpeaking would be bundled with the Corel WordPerfect legal suite. But a week later, Dragon and Corel expanded their partnership to include every version of Corel WordPerfect 8.

Because of this partnership, Dragon is developing a module called NaturalWord for WordPerfect which allows Dragon NaturallySpeaking to be integrated with Corel WordPerfect 8 the same way that NaturalWord allows Dragon NaturallySpeaking to be integrate with Microsoft Word 97. Dragon was demonstrating a beta version of NaturalWord for WordPerfect at the Demo' 98 conference the week of February 1st.

Having used NaturalWord for WordPerfect, I can tell you that works like NaturalWord for Microsoft Word. With NaturalWord for WordPerfect you can dictate directly into WordPerfect 8,and correct using all of Dragon NaturallySpeaking's award-winning correcting and editing features.

However, NaturalWord for WordPerfect does require that you upgrade Corel WordPerfect 8 to revision D. This revision of WordPerfect 8 should be available from Corel in a few months. Also, the details of how NaturalWord for WordPerfect will be distributed by Dragon Systems has not been announced.

Personal Opinion

I have only limited experience with using WordPerfect. I used to prefer WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, but that was in the days before you got Microsoft Word free with every computer. Since then, I had been using Microsoft Word almost exclusively so I cannot comment on the advantages of using WordPerfect.

When Dragon integrated Dragon NaturallySpeaking with Microsoft Word 97 using the NaturalWord module, all of the work was done by Dragon. This means that the behavior of Microsoft Word did not change except in those areas which are considerable via add-ins. But Corel has indicated that they are interested in making their applications suite more voice aware that could be done with an add-on module. If you believe Corel, this means that we may see new versions of Corel WordPerfect and other applications in the Corel WordPerfect suite become even easier to use by voice and better integrated with voice recognition systems.

NaturalWord for WordPerfect appears to be as good if not better than NaturalWord. Preliminary versions seem to indicate that dictation into WordPerfect will be faster than dictation into Microsoft Word. However, users of WordPerfect will be required to upgrade to a version which is capable of working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, in this may limit the initial acceptance of NaturalWord for WordPerfect.

This web page (http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/WordPerfectBundle.html) was last modified on January 14, 2000. The contents of this page are (c) Copyright 1998-1999 by Joel Gould. All Rights Reserved. See Copyright Information for more details.