There are two programs on my desktop that I consider to be absolutely indispensable. They save me time each and every day and the fact that they are available only on Windows is probably the primary reason I haven’t moved to Linux. The hit to my productivity would simply be too great if I lost access to them.

They are Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Siber Systems’ AI Roboform. Anybody who does what I do for a living should consider investing in them.

Dragon has been around for more than 10 years, and they have been eventful ones. In the late 90s, the company that owned the software at the time was a darling of the Internet bubble, reaching valuations in the billions of dollars. Then there was a crash, an accounting scandal and some generally negative publicity about speech recognition software. The product faded from view for several years, but Nuance picked it up and has continued to develop it.

Speech recognition companies have long claimed accuracy rates north of 90%. I’ve never found this to be true, at least in my case. NaturallySpeaking version 8 probably gets about eight out of every 10 words correct out of the box, which isn’t bad. With training, you can indeed get accuracy up to the 90 to 95% range. Here’s a tip: backup your user files, because if you experience a hard disk crash, all of that training will go to waste.

I find that NaturallySpeaking about doubles my word output, which is important when words are a unit of payment. Even though I type 90 wpm, I dictate much faster than that and Dragon reduces eyestrain and the risk of repetitive stress injury. For $60 on eBay, it was is a great investment.

Roboform is a password manager/form filler/password generator and the only shareware I pay for. Most browsers have the ability to save passwords but Roboform does a lot more. It can store a rich set of information about a user’s identity and automatically fill forms with that data. This is enormously useful if you register on a lot of web sites – and who doesn’t these days? With Roboform, registration is a one-click process. The software also retains information about multiple credit cards and bank accounts, making it easy to fill in that information with one click.

The password manager organizes passwords in a master list that is easy to navigate. To go to any password-protected website, you click on the toolbar icon and select the account. Roboform takes you to the login page and signs you in. I am registered on well over 300 web sites, and it would be simply impossible to keep track of them without this program. Another very nice feature is that the Roboform user files can be stored on a server. That means that my current database of passwords is available to me from any computer on my network.

Roboform has some quirks that make it annoying at times. The vendor seems to release .updates about every week, and upgrading is an intrusive process. Also, Roboform has an annoying tendency to try to save login information as a new account, even when the account is already in the database. I dislike the number of dialog boxes it throws at me, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a very useful productivity tool.

I just wish they had it on Linux.