Being able to dictate to your PC and have it reproduce the text in Word, Word Perfect or Outlook Express still has a twinge of magic about it. That's what Dragon Naturally Speaking does, though, and with very little fuss or training. Now in version 7 and owned by Scansoft (who bought Lernout & Hauspie, who in turn bought Dragon), Dragon Naturally Speaking 7 claims to do it more accurately and with less effort than ever before.

Installation of the program in any recent version of Windows is straightforward and the mandatory training is now down to around five minutes, though spending an extra half-hour improves overall accuracy. You can increase accuracy still further by using the new Vocabulary Optimiser, which searches through your document folders and builds a database of your typical vocabulary. It then identifies 'IT Reviews', rather than 'Blighty Renews', for example.

The program interprets directly into its own DragonPad text editor, but most people will run it in collaboration with Word. Here it works well, feeding text straight onto the page at a speed well in excess of even the fastest touch-typist. Bar the occasional need to select a misunderstood word and choose from a list of likely corrections, dictation proves a lot easier than typing.

It's still the little words Dragon Naturally Speaking 7 has trouble with - the ones you think it would be easy to differentiate. 'A' and 'the' are favourites - most people pronounce them 'uh' and 'thuh' when dictating sentences, but at least it now shows numbers below 10 as words; displaying single digits, such as '3', '7' and '9', was a continuing annoyance in DNS6. Homonyms like 'to', 'too' and 'two' are obviously difficult for software to work out, but considering how much the program gets right, you learn to live with these minor irritations. In case you wondered, this review is entirely dictated.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 7 Preferred supports audio files created in Pocket PC machines, as well as in certain Olympus digital dictation machines, so you can transcribe documents you've created on the move once you get back to your PC. Scansoft claims the program will work with a 500MHz Pentium III with 256MB of memory. While the RAM spec is about right, we reckon you need a PC above 1GHz to work smoothly with the program.

There are several versions of Dragon Naturally Speaking 7, from the basic Essentials, which lacks the convenience of the Natural Language commands (navigating Windows, Word etc. by voice), through Standard which can't work with dictation files created from Pocket PC, to Preferred, the version reviewed here. An upgrade version of the Preferred version is available for £60 plus VAT. Further up is Dragon Naturally Speaking 7 Professional, which supports wireless microphones. Full details of the differences between these products are available from the Scansoft site.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 7 Preferred offers still better accuracy from what is the leading speech recognition application for Windows. Extra features, like the Vocabulary Optimiser and the ability to work from Pocket PC dictation files, increase its versatility.