Do laptops handle speech recognition software well?

[raccoon]

I'm thinking of getting both.

I had Dragon Dictate way back in the '90's. I wasn't real pleased with it then. I expect voice recognition software has come a long way since then.

[canetoad]

1. I looked into this recently

While text-to-speech software is common, the only speech-to-text that I could find was Dragon Naturally Speaking, so I read a few reviews about it's effectiveness.

Despite what Dragon say on their website, some reviews said that accuracy was only about 4 words out of 5, even after 'training' the program to recognise the nuances of a particular voice. This and the cost of $200 put us off going any further.

As far as hardware - there's no reason it shouldn't work well with a recent laptop that has a good microphone.