I used to use Dragon several years ago. Of the reasons for stopping was the headset that came with Dragon broke and accuracy was strangely good at home but not at my office. Both environments were quiet. At home the computer was an old IBM Thinkpad with Windows XP. At the office, the comuter was a newer Dell tower with Vista.

I'm reading things about a USB sound pod but not sure that would make a difference? I read the getting started with windows speech recognition article and would like to try it. Any suggestions on a good microphone that is not too expensive yet will give few errors in my quiet offices?

MacktheKnife wrote: I used to use Dragon several years ago. Of the reasons for stopping was the headset that came with Dragon broke and accuracy was strangely good at home but not at my office. Both environments were quiet. At home the computer was an old IBM Thinkpad with Windows XP. At the office, the comuter was a newer Dell tower with Vista. I'm reading things about a USB sound pod but not sure that would make a difference? I read the getting started with windows speech recognition article and would like to try it. Any suggestions on a good microphone that is not too expensive yet will give few errors in my quiet offices?

1. A good microphone that not only send the purest audio, but also rejects backgroun noise.
2. A good sound card that takes your analog speech waves and converts these to digital bits and bytes a computer understands. A USB sound pod is simply a sound card that sits outside the computer. Audio from the microphone is passed directly into the computer CPU, bypassing electronic noise within the computer.
3. The human factor. This includes:

• Good enunciation. Each word should be clearly spoken, separate from other words.
• Speak in phrases. Because speech recognition software uses context of surrounding words as in, "They're going to park their car over there," speaking in phrases helps the software figure out which homophone to use.
• Understanding how to use the program and make corrections. Corrections improve your user training profile. Most speech recognition software has tutorials built in. It is well worth the time to go through these as it will save you much time later on.

The 2 headsets under $100.00 to look at are the http://www.emicrophones.com/p-1136-vxi-talkpro-xpress-headset-and-vxi-full-duplex-usb-pod.aspx - VXI Xpressway with USB and the http://www.emicrophones.com/p-1127-andrea-anc-700-headset-usb-sa-pod.aspx - Andrea ANC-700/USB

Marty Markoe, eMicrophones, Inc.