The number of speech recognition systems readily available for general use has been dropping over the years, and with IBM saying it's no longer actively developing ViaVoice, ScanSoft's Dragon Naturally Speaking is the only real player. It's a good job the new version, version 8, addresses many niggles that have annoyed users of version 7.

Installation is reasonably straightforward and initial training has been reduced to a minimum, so you only have to spend a few minutes speaking to the program before you can start to use it. You do have to activate your installation, though, which is an irritation.

The one necessity of any speech recognition system is that it's accurate. Speaking is obviously faster than typing, but if you have to spend time correcting your text for grammatical errors, it loses its main advantage. ScanSoft claims Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 Professional is now 99% accurate, or put another way, it makes one mistake every hundred words. While our tests didn't show quite this level of accuracy, it's still considerably better than version 7 and far less time is spent correcting text.

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Just as important, for many users, will be the ability to adjust the vocabulary to a specific style. By this we don't necessarily mean the use of technical vocabularies, as Dragon Naturally Speaking has for several years included scientific and legal libraries which make it suitable for these vertical markets. Rather, in Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 Professional, you can adjust the formatting of individual words to fit a specific house style. No more endlessly telling the program you really do mean '3D' and not '3-D', when you say 'Three Dee'.

As with any speech recognition system, Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 Professional makes no spelling mistakes. It might use the homonyms in the wrong context ('sea' instead of 'see', for example), but as they come straight from its 300,000 word vocabulary, they'll all be spelt correctly.

If you need to dictate on the move, you can to use an approved digital dictation device, a Pocket PC or now a Palm Tungsten. Although you could do this in version 7, you had to create an individual speech profile for your dictation device, separate from the one for the headset you normally use for desktop speech recognition. Now you can integrate these devices into a single Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 Professional setup and use the same vocabulary and settings for all.

We're always amazed that more people don't use speech recognition when working with computers, as it increases the speed at which you can enter text four- or five-fold. The Professional version also works in Excel, Outlook and most other Windows applications, giving the possibility of near hands-free operation.

Although the Professional version of Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 costs a significant amount, there's also the Preferred version, without Professional's macro scripting, at around £135 inc. VAT, and the standard version, primarily for dictation into Word and WordPerfect, at £72 inc. VAT.

Dragon Naturally Speaking continues to improve its accuracy with version 8. Combined with increased flexibility in tailoring the system to your own particular style, this makes it a pleasure to use. There is very little reason for anyone to suffer from keyboard-related strains with this application available.