Tired of typing, but afraid to take the leap into voice recognition software? Dragon Professional Individual For Dummies, 5th Edition gives you a great overview of the industry-leading speech recognition software so you can start talking instead of typing in no time at all. With this easy-to-use guide, you'll quickly find out how to use Professional Individual to open documents, write emails and notes, update your Facebook status, and much more. The book includes everything you need to get started, from launching the software and basic dictating to controlling your desktop by voice, and tips for improving accuracy. Available for both Windows and Mac, Dragon Professional Individual is the gold standard for home and professional voice recognition software.

Your speech-recognizing friends at Nuance are back with a major update to their flagship app, Dragon. The popular productivity software is now in its 15th version, an update that promises some substantial improvements in accuracy courtesy of the company's own deep learning tech, which forms the basis of its speech engine. According to Nuance, this latest upgrade brings better accuracy "upwards of 24 percent," with improved ability to recognize and learn accents and voice patterns, while adapting to the acoustics of the speaker's environment. Here's a quote from the company's CTO, "Training such Deep Neural Net models typically requires large amounts of training data and a high-performance computing environment. However, our new Dragon portfolio includes our latest breakthrough that allows Dragon's Deep Neural Nets to continuously learn from the user's speech during use on a standard personal computer, and drive accuracy rates in some instances up to 24 percent higher." Version 15 also brings a simplified UI, formatting improvements, more support for audio transcription and optimization for a number of touchscreen Windows PCs.

With the trends in personal computing favoring software that gets to know its users, the newest version of Nuance's Dragon voice dictation suite of software--Dragon 15, announced Tuesday--is right on track. Dragon 15--including Dragon Professional Individual ( 300), Dragon Professional Individual for Mac ( 300), Dragon Legal ( 500), and Nuance Dragon Anywhere (free to install; subscriptions run 15/month or 150/year)--is based on Nuance's new machine-learning technology. The company claims that this technology has improved recognition accuracy by at least 24 percent, thanks to its algorithm that learns your distinctive speech patterns over time combined with an improved capability to pick out speech from a noisy room. Lawyers may buy the expanded Legal version, which is trained using a legal vocabulary of more than 400 million words, according to the company. But the majority of Nuance's customers will probably invest in the Dragon Professional Individual version, which is designed for a more general vocabulary.