Natural dictation has come to the PC, and although it still needs patience, perseverance and a powerful machine, you can now produce professional-looking documents just by talking. Both the home and business versions of these speech recognition packages have been compared in our Value for Money calculations in order to show the effect of the extra features and higher price of the business editions. Although these business versions achieve a higher VFM score than their home-targetted equivalents, indicating that the extra features outweigh the higher prices, you should be sure that you're likely to use those features before you disregard the cheaper home editions. NaturallySpeaking's significantly higher usability scores boost both versions' VFM, despite each being the most expensive in its group. This chart shows our assessment of the relative value for money for each of the products in this review.
Longer bars represent better value for money.
Products are sorted by price, with the highest price at the top. Where products have the same price, they are shown in alphabetical order. The resulting raw VFM scores are then made relative to the lowest- scoring product. To use the graph, first see which products fall within your chosen price range, by looking at the column of prices on the right. The best value product within that range is then the one with the longest bar.