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At the beginning of February, 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 NaturalWP 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 NaturalWP at the Demo' 98 conference the week of February 1st. Having used NaturalWP, I can tell you that works like NaturalWord. With NaturalWP you can dictate directly into WordPerfect 8,and correct using all of Dragon NaturallySpeaking's award-winning correcting and editing features. However, NaturalWP 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 NaturalWP 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. NaturalWP 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 NaturalWP. |
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