One of the main advantages of Professional over Preferred is the macro ability. This allows sophisticated voice integration into other products and will be of value to bespoke designers and resellers. It is modelled loosely on Basic and allows voice control of virtually anything the computer can do. Even without macro programming, NaturallySpeaking can start and control most Windows programs, including Internet Explorer 5. It can trigger any program available from the start button by name without having to go down the menu tree.
Web surfing by voice can be awkward if the link text is long or complicated.
The NaturalWord and NaturalLanguage commands allow better management of selected common desktop applications, including Word, WordPerfect, Outlook and Wordpad. Disappointingly, this sounded like a robot with a sore throat. Monitoring memory showed that NaturallySpeaking took about 53MB on start-up, rising to 60MB after some speech recognition had been completed. General training ate up another 20MB but released it properly on termination and IE 5 took a further 15MB when launched. Based on these numbers, we recommend a minimum of 128MB RAM, especially if NaturallySpeaking is to be used with other programs.