After having used Dragon a reasonable amount over the last few weeks, I have two beefs.
First, it provides no reliable way to back up customizations I've made. That includes the training that the package provides the user, in which it learns nuances about how he speaks and tries to do a better job of understanding, and also customized words that the user has taught the product such as how to spell people's names, or special words that have been defined. (I've defined words such as "onbold," "ongreen" "offbold" and "postround")
But in the short time I've been using Dragon, I've already lost my "user profile" twice, and have essentially been forced to start over. Dragon includes 'backup profile' and 'restore profile' commands, but each time I needed to restore, the command was grayed out. I don't have any confidence in it.
You'd think that the profile would be a file that could be copied by a user at the operationg system level and stored elsewhere. But the folks at Dragon have gone out of their way to keep users from doing so. If the profile is stored as a file unto itself, they're keeping its name and location to themselves. (I have the Home Version. The Professional version of Dragon advertises profile portability as one of its features. So, it seems that they really did go out of their way to make profiles difficult for Home users to access.)
Second, and this is one that has really got my goat tonight, is that if the word "close" is used in a sentence and a speaker pauses, Dragon promptly closes the browser. There is no way to undo this, and the product is not decent enough to ask me "are you sure?" before it initiates the destructive action. It's even that done this to me when I didn't say close at all, but something similar. I think that Dragon must have a way to disable some of its commands, but I've been looking for well over an hour through both the product help and the internet and have been unable to find how.
Both my complaints are things that could be easily fixed if the products author so desired. And perhaps I will learn that there are fixes, but if that's the case then the product needs to make the solutions a little bit easier to find.
I'm still very impressed with Dragon but instead of giving it an A+, I'll give it a B+. Having to start over every time it or Windows crashes will keep it out of the A ranking until I find a reliable way to backup my profile.
The browser issue, is at least as aggravating when it happens, but the damage isn't as serious as the inability to backup my profile and having to start over. It pretty much just amounts to my losing whatever message I have been narrating.
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