With very few exceptions, a desktop system with a separate sound card will give you better results than a laptop computer. Laptops are noisier (electrical noise) than desktops and speech recognition is very sensitive to noise. That said, all is not lost.
|
| Dragon Systems does list some laptops which work adequately on its web page. Make sure you check out the list before you buy. |
|
| I use a Micron Transport XPE laptop and it works great. I highly recommend Micron laptops. The sound quality is not quite as good as my desktop system with a real Creative Labs SoundBlaster 6 PnP, but it is close. My laptop system is a 150 MHz Pentium with 48 MB, faster is fine as well. |
|
| Micron now offers two other models called the XKE and VLX. Both of these models are also reported to have a good sound system for speech recognition. Micron seems to be working hard to make sure their laptops are the best. |
|
| (Early versions of the Micron XKE and VLX laptop computers did not have as good sound system as would normally be acceptable for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. But Dragon Systems has been working with Micron, and Micron has been working with ESS. And together we have improved quality of the Micron laptop computers so that they are now good with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.) |
|
| There are probably other laptop computers out there which work well with NatSpeak but no other names come to mind. Check the Dragon web page and remember that there are a lot more laptops which are too noisy to run speech recognition than systems which run it well. |
|
| (Jun 27, 1998 update: I now use a Micron Transport XKE with a Pentium 266 MHz process and 96 MB or RAM. This is sufficient to run Drgaon NaturallySpeaking version 3.0 with BestMatch models, a 64,000 word vocabulary and NaturalWord in both Microsoft Word 97 and Corel WordPerfect 8.) |
|