I've used Dragon Naturally Speaking from the very first edition. I still have the Parrot microphone it came with somewhere around here. I began using it because of the reports I had to do in business. I had arthritis in my left arm and both hands that made typing and eventually keyboarding difficult and I thought I'd give it a try. I'm glad I did because it allowed me to keep writing - now if I have to go and sign any type of paper where they say sign here, here, here and here - I can do here and here before my fingers cramp up. :icon_lol: Learning to use Dragon is not any more difficult than learning how to type. Most people forget the difficulties they had when first learning to type. And that goes for just about anything else you've done - sports, a musical instrument etc. Most of us forget it because we did it when we were kids and it was just the learning process.
That being said - the willingness to persevere - is only part of it. Because how you work can also play into it. I was great at doing the reports and verbal presentations for work because I could do it in bullet points and extrapolate. But when it came to trying to write fiction, I was a total failure. I couldn't do it. I had a heart attack in March 2012 and was lying in bed with nothing to do when I decided to try again. I had bought a Blackberry Playbook in December and figured I would just hunt and peck out a book. Still had difficulty trying to get the plot down and couldn't figure out why. So I started searching the Internet for ideas on how to do it and came across people like Konrath (I could really publish it by myself if I could do it - incentive to finish!) and Kristine Katherine Rush and.... Dean Wesley Smith. He talked about a strange a method called writing into the dark. Screw it, I'll try it. Pow! My imagination started having fun and when I was able to get back to my computer and started using Dragon, writing was a lot of fun. I wasn't an outliner when it came to fiction. I finished that book and had to rearrange things because I didn't understand things like action-reaction sequences and all of the other craft stuff but I had done it.
I mention that because you may not be someone who can "talk" out your book. I'm not an outliner, I have to write into the dark. How many times over at Kboards did you see people arguing one method over the other? I won't do the same thing here with Dragon or dictation in general. It has its good points and its bad points. I have allergies which plug me up from time to time and I have to take more time because Dragon can't figure out what I'm saying. But the more you work with it the better you get at using it. When you have a lot of stories you can let Dragon run through them and it learns how you write. It definitely improves the accuracy. Most people don't take time to go through the 'training' aspect when you first get it. They don't want to take an hour here and there to train their Dragon - I understand for many people that hour might be the only one they get (insert "you reap what you sow" here). I still do it from time to time, helping Dragon to learn/improve on how I pronounce things. It still confuses those homophones every so often but people who type also have typos. I use the method that Dean Wesley Smith talks about - I cycle through my work every one or two hundred words - at times when the story is simply moving along I'll wait until a complete chapter is done - for me between 1-2,000 words. I write clean first copy. If I have to change something or add something into what I've already written, I cycle through the chapter to make sure I haven't added a typo or homophone or missed a word. I run it through Grammarly as well to pick up what I miss. It works but that's me. That's how I work.
Sorry for the long ass reply but I did use Dragon to "write" this - and yes, Dragon put in "right" that I had to tell it to correct.
Edited to add a few comments
1. Your desire/need
How many people say they want to write a book? You've proven your willingness to do what 99% of those people couldn't do - persevere and actually write a book. You need the same kind of willingness or perseverance with Dragon. In my case I had a "need" that made me work with it.
2. The microphone you use has a lot to do with it. You might have to experiment - provided you can afford the expense of going through two or three if you don't hit it on the first try. Nuance has recommendations for microphones, recorders, etc.
http://support.nuance.com/compatibility/default.asp3. Pay attention to the system requirements for the version you're considering or using. More computing power, RAM, etc. will make a difference.
4. Go through the training.
5. Dragon is better than the other speech recognition programs (my opinion). I tried others - even after years of using Dragon to see if would make a difference - and it didn't work. Now that was me and you may be different. But there is usually a reason why one piece of software becomes a better seller than the others. In this case Nuance has done a great job with speech recognition software.
