Dragon

Dragon is still a strong choice for professional dictation, particularly when you spend hours working inside Windows applications. Its custom vocabulary, voice commands, hands-free control and ability to transcribe prerecorded audio give it more depth than basic built-in speech-to-text features.

The trade-off is its narrower platform focus and more complicated product lineup. Dragon Professional Anywhere also relies on a cloud connection, while traditional desktop editions follow a different deployment model. If you mainly need quick meeting transcripts, a service such as Otter.ai is easier to use. If you need to control your Windows workflow by voice, Dragon is much harder to replace.

Dragon is professional speech recognition software that turns your voice into text and lets you control supported Windows applications with spoken commands. It is built for people who spend a large part of their working day writing, editing or documenting information.

The software can learn custom words and adapt to a user's voice, which becomes useful when ordinary dictation tools keep getting names or specialist terms wrong. Dragon Professional also supports prerecorded audio transcription, while voice commands can handle actions such as launching applications, inserting text and controlling parts of a workflow.

There are several Dragon products, so the name can be a little confusing at first. Dragon Professional is aimed at Windows desktop users, while Dragon Professional Anywhere uses a cloud-based architecture and is designed for organizations that want centralized deployment and administration.