I cannot believe how much technology has improved. For many years I have been using Dragon naturally speaking to help me with my dyslexia, one of the most important things to remember is to get the most out of Dragon natural speaking is to use  a quality microphone. If you are using a laptop I would recommend using an external soundcard dongle these usually are a USB type which have two inputs, one is for your microphone and the other is for your  audio. Using an external soundcard dongle will eliminate any interference from noisy internal components in your laptop , some of my favourite headsets I have been using are the  Andrea brands you can pay approximately £34 to £300 other  brands can vary from £75 to the top end of £300. The Andrea headsets have some unusual design features the noise cancelling system is unique I would recommend reading more about this by going to the Andrea Electronics website. Next important thing is to set up your microphone with Dragon natural speaking and create a user profile.

If you have got dyslexia I would recommend having somebody alongside you who can help you to read the instructions when setting up and creating your user profile.

Setting up Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 11.5 is very easy.

Once you've installed the programme, plug your external soundcard USB dongle or an Andrea Bluetooth dongle, start-up Dragon natural speaking and follow the instructions on screen. The next stage of the software will consist of making a  user profile and setting the recording volume levels for your headset device.

After you set up your user profile I would recommend going to read text to improve the accuracy, this will take approximately half an hour. When I do this I had my wife sitting by my side whispering  the words I could not read or pronounce, you only have to do this once, if there is more than one person using Dragon NaturallySpeaking each person must make a user profile, please don't be put off by reading text to improve the accuracy.

The last stage is to determine which settings you do not need to have active in Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Technology has advanced enough to have a Bluetooth headset that can be used with Dragon natural speaking, I am currently using the Andrea BT 201 Bluetooth headset. This has a military grade noise cancelling microphone it is very easy to set up you have the advantage of not having a traditional wire headset which is tethered to your computer. The accuracy is incredible, when I researched the Internet on reviews about this product most people seem to be disappointed but I did come across one review that was  very positive about using the Andrea BT 201 headset  with Dragon natural speaking. 

I decided to go ahead and purchase the Andrea Bluetooth headset BT 201 , I downloaded the driver software from Andrea's website and plugged in the Bluetooth dongle that came with the device I followed the instructions on how to pair the headset to my laptop then proceeded to make a  user profile. Dragon natural speaking first displayed the setup window for checking the audio device recording level after doing this I proceeded to the next page of selecting an article to read, I chose Charlie and the chocolate factory. When I started reading Dragon NaturallySpeaking started to highlight each word but it was having a problem recognising my speech, it was very easy to give up at this stage but after a few seconds Dragon natural speaking displayed a window stating that it would be better to disable the highlighting and following the text. I disabled the feature then proceeded to read the text at the end of reading the text Dragon NaturallySpeaking 

started to do its voice profile adaption, this took approximately an hour to complete. Then I started to do some testing by reading in some articles from a book I could not believe the accuracy. Now and again Dragon would not recognise certain words, but I think it's more likely to be the way I have difficulty pronouncing that as soon as I say  contracts that  command a window is displayed, which contains a list of words. I simply choose the correct one. If by any chance that the correct word is not on the list I type it in and train that word, over time Dragon NaturallySpeaking will get used to how you pronounced your words, you can have the software read out aloud a word which helps to make sure you've replaced the correct word from the auto correct list.

This was written using Dragon naturally speaking version 11.5 with a Andrea Bluetooth BT 201 headset