Dragon Naturally Speaking for Teens

According to the Dragon they no longer carry the Dragon for Teens. Only for adults. There’s a Dragon website; however, I don’t know the exact name.

I think it was not working very well and they pulled it from the market.

Helen

A few years ago we bought the DNS standard edition. When you go to set up a user, you have a choice of adult or teen. So perhaps it was simply incorporated into their standard product.

Gotta tell you though, your child needs to be pretty motivated to get voice recognition to work. First, you have to teach it by reading to it from certain preselected texts. The more you read to it, the better it understands you. This alone was pretty challenging for my dyslexic son. Then you have to be disciplined enough to reteach it every time it makes a mistake (even when it’s so much easier just to fix the mistake by typing). For our son who has a low frustration threshold, it was just more trouble than it was worth.

BTW, we bought our copy through Ebay.

I have had good luck with Dragon speak naturally (recent version that is compatible with win XP). I did not see any teen version or teen choice in the voice. It was straight forward to install-clear directions.

Voice training is very important. I did it for my own voice for practice so that I could assist my child. It did a good job after the 2nd reading. It did a superlative job after a 3rd reading. Correction is quite simple -highlight text, say correction and then spell or resay. It got more accurate very quickly. 1st dictation was tough (but funny, my daughter was amazed that the computer could make such obvious errors) 2nd easier (my daughter got the hag of correction) and by the 3rd or 4th very little correction needed. My daughter (last summer, between gr 5 and 6) was dictating email messages comfortably within 3 days. The 2nd reading is long and takes some oomph but they had passages from treasure island for younger students to read aloud. We would pause the machine I would read more difficult, short passages to her and then she would read them for the machine.
I would say do the training yourself so you know what to expect for your child. Plan some reward to get through that long 2nd reading. Do little dictations to begin with. This is not the program to try the night before a big assignment. I have to say it was well worth the effort for my daughter to be able to independently compose written material at her thinking level.

I have also used ViaVoice which was awful and I do not recommend. I used the new mac version of Via Voice (I would rather buy a PC and use dragon speak naturally then go thru the pain of ViaVoice again)

I’d recommend you find a school (our community college does it) that has workshops for doing the training process because it *is* intense, and triply so for a kiddo with language or attention challenges. That setting helped me keep from getting lazy about the corrections. I was very impressed with the accuracy after doing the training right — but as I said, it requires lots of reading and spontaneous language processing (which I’m ferociously good at, but it was still intense!).
I’ve heard teachers say that they just *describe* the training process and it essentially inspires their teen students to work harder at keyboarding skills. However, the more difficult typing and writing are, the more it’s worth going through the process and in the Grand Scope Of Things it’s not *that* long and tedious compared to the amount of stuff we have to write day in and day out.

Dragon Naturally Speaking came packaged with Corel (WordPerfect 10) when I purchased that software. I tried it myself just once and was put off by the error correction procedures.