"The hardest thing about using Dragon was getting used to speaking conversationally rather than one word at a time," reports Joe Sedita, a partner in the business litigation group at Hodgson Russ in Buffalo. "It was easy – easier than I expected," he says.

Given that Joe has been using speech recognition software for only a few weeks, his satisfaction reinforces how quickly professionals can be trained and begin speaking their work, rather than typing.

Joe actually heard about speech recognition tools two or three years ago but didn't investigate further until about four months ago, when a colleague enthusiastically recommended Dragon Naturally Speaking. A quick call to Achieve Results resulted in a visit from President Dana Abramson, who gave him a taste of how soon he could be up-to-speed – it was a matter of minutes.

Although most Dragon users find the tool helps to create documents in Microsoft Word, Joe uses the software more for email, which he send a lot of, he says. "Talking my email is easier than typing." But to create documents, he still uses Dragon, talking through his notes and then transferring them via email to his secretary, who converts the file to Word and formats them as required.

Already he's identified several advantages of using Dragon. First, "it makes you a better dictator," he says, because you can see your spoken words on screen in front of you. Second, you can also see where you've been – what you've already completed – "which makes it a lot faster to come back to something when you're interrupted," Joe finds.

The biggest benefit, however, is the impact Dragon has had on the work his secretary does for him. Rather than spending her days typing up dictated files, she can now "do more thinking work than typing…it's a much better use of her time," he says. The result? "It's going to make us more efficient." "I'm really pleased with it," he says.