For several months now you’ve been listening to me reading some of my words about Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred 9. In the early days I took a typing test of Dragon NaturallySpeaking just a few days after I’d taken it out of the box. At the time I attempted to take that typing test under fairly good conditions.

There wasn’t much background noise, no distractions and everything was just about right. The computer was nice and cool and freshly rebooted there weren’t a lot of other programs running either. Well today I wanted to test it again under tougher conditions.

So I took my laptop outside, where was about 94° outside. I was standing immediately underneath a ceiling fan blazing on high, there are lots of external noises around kids playing outside dogs barking and various other items. I had a mess of programs open on my desktop including Firefox which had been running all day and is a notorious memory hog.

So I went and found my infamous British typing tests. These are a PHP-based typing test. It’s not java like many other online typing tests, and it allows me to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to read the words of the test and have a transcription automatically created in a box that is then checked for accuracy and speed.

Typing tests in general are set up in a way that forces typers to try and use all of their fingers on many different keys. So they tend to use atypical words with atypical sentence structure. For the test I took, the words in the sentence structure, were very unfamiliar to me.

In fact you could say they were foreign to me in most cases. Some some of those words may have been old English, or possibly Scottish or Yiddish for all I know. but they definitely weren’t easy!

So here’s the video I put together to show you how this all transpired and how well it worked. As I warmed up to the typing test, I eventually hit a top speed that was higher than I’d seen before.

168 words per minute with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Preferred!

but wait until you see the other issues I ran into . . .

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