Well, I have been using Knowbrainer and Voice Power for another couple weeks.I thought I would have made more progress but I haven't gotten to the point that either program is a productivity maker.

I went into this to improve my throughput using speech recognition. I've been using speech recognition for 11 years every day for work. As I mentioned before, my goal is not to control the computer with my voice, but rather to work faster by having voice do more than before. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I tend to learn new programs readily.

I have found that context sensitive help to be a boon in learning new programs. Voicepower has context sensitive help all along but the help screens are so compact and so extensive that it's pretty easy to get lost. Knowbrainer seems much the opposite in having less of such documentation, leading me to keep the printed manual open nearby. the Knowbrainer manual listed some commands that were not available in my version of the program, something not apparent until I posted a message on their user forum (which was answered promptly).

I still love Voicepower's ability to access drives and directories with simple voice navigation. Knowbrainer affords such navigation only to folders you have pre-designated with a two-step command creation.

Both programs have plenty of commands for Microsoft Outlook that let you go through e-mail tasks intuitively. In both cases, you can usually say what you think you ought to be able to say. But how much time does one save by saying "Go to Tasks" instead of typing "Ctrl+y T"? If you are not using speech to overcome a disability or injury, you may not find much time savings from a lot of email commands.

I haven't done much with Internet browser navigation. I just don't do much of that at work.

I like the extra commands that Knowbrainer offers for doing corrections. Some of them save a couple of steps with each correction. Both programs allow for voice formatting of fonts and paragraphs, which is helpful.

Knowbrainer has some neat commands like the ability to create itemized lists in different formats, the ability to create commands both within and outside of Dragon, other goodies like that. I was not familiar with how its scriptwriting functionality worked. I originally thought it somehow provided a natural language interface to script writing but in fact, you still have to know all the arcane scripting language; Knowbrainer just allows you to dictate the code in nicely formatted chunks.

So, in a little less than a month, I have gotten to many of the "geewhiz" features of both programs but neither has become a true productivity tool
in that I haven't Recouped more time than I have invested. But I am an inveterate tinkerer andI will put at least another month into learning both programs.

Both vendors have mentioned an upgrade being available momentarily.

Part 3 soon...

Stan