Difference between Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred Edition and Legal Edition

by Adam Cronkrite
MCP, A+

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Dragon NaturallySpeaking has 5 different editions, Standard, Preferred, Professional, Legal, and Medical. Each edition has been specifically tuned to meet the demands of the user in a particular way. At its core, all 5 editions share the same base vocabulary of words, however, Medical has an additional 30,000 words and Legal has an additional 25,000 words, unique to the specific profession.

Although the vocabularies may roughly be the same, the way in which Dragon interprets certain usage of words vary depending upon the edition of Dragon you are using. The Legal edition is optimized to recognize unique words used within the legal profession.

As a Legal professional, when referring to court cases, some typical wording that would be seen is, "Person A v. Person B". When we say that phrase out loud, we would say the word versus and not "v.". Now if you were using the Preferred edition and dictated that phrase it would come out as "Person A versus Person B". However, in the Legal edition, when you dictate the phrase it would appear as "Person A v. Person B". The Legal edition knows to substitute "v." for the word "versus" when used in that particular fashion.

Another example would be the word "Honorable". In the Preferred edition if you were to say "Honorable Adam Smith" it would come out as you see there. In the Legal edition that same phrase would come out as "Hon. Adam Smith".

Furthermore, the Legal edition of Dragon is able to format citations properly. Below we can see two examples of how Preferred would display the dictation of a citation versus how Legal would display it.