I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional in 2019. It was $700. I justified it as a productivity investment. I used it for about three months before I stopped.

Not because it was bad. Because it was annoying.

Here is the honest comparison between Dragon and what I am using now.

The Dragon Experience

Dragon is impressive software. The accuracy on trained profiles is legitimately excellent — better than anything else available in 2019, and the desktop dictation market has not exactly exploded since then.

But the friction is real:

Training time. Dragon asks you to read passages for 10-30 minutes to build your voice profile. The more you train, the better it gets. That is fine for people who dictate hours per day. For occasional use, it is a tax that never feels worth it.

Process coupling. Dragon works best when it is deeply integrated — Dragon-aware apps, dictation commands, custom vocabulary. When you work across many apps (browser, Slack, VS Code, terminals), the experience is inconsistent.…