Philips SpeechMike Air

This microphone is a joke. I bought this expecting it to work with the built-in Bluetooth on my laptop for use with Dragon. It does NOT work with the built-in Bluetooth, but requires a stupid dongle hanging off your USB port! That means every time I move my laptop, I risk breaking the dongle or have to disconnect it.

Worse, the dongle is tied to only 1 instance of the software, so you can't even share this microphone with more than 1 computer!

Returned this immediately upon finding this out. Shame on you, Philips. You need to make a true Bluetooth dictation microphone that will work with any Bluetooth computer, not this joke.

There are two other reviews of the Phillips SpeechMike Air at the time of the writing of this review. I just bought this microphone, used, at a significant discount, and it works terrifically. I find that the recognition accuracy is better than my old wired USB Philips SpeechMike Pro, which I have used for probably five or six years. In fact, the recognition accuracy is simply terrific.

The freedom to be able to walk around my office with a wireless microphone, and dictate as I move around is wonderful. I had an extension cord on my old wired USB mic (and perhaps that was some of the reason for decreased recognition accuracy), but an extension cord is just not as good a solution as wireless.

Right out-of-the-box, it has worked perfectly. Setup was incredibly easy although I will mention that I am a long-time user of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I am very familiar with the program.

One of the other reviewers criticized the use of a dongle instead of a straight USB connection, and certainly, if you plan to use the wireless microphone on a laptop, the dongle will certainly be less advantageous. But, for the tremendous recognition accuracy that this microphone provides, I certainly would be willing to try it on my laptop. My thought is that the improved recognition accuracy would be worth the inconvenience of the dongle. I dictate usually only on my desktop machine at work.

All in all this is a terrific microphone, probably the best I have used in 20 years with DragonDictate and then Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

I will try to check back six months from now and report on how well it continues to work at that point in time.

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I used the SpeechMike Air at my desktop for six months and was happy with its performance with Dragon Naturally Speaking software though it's not as good as a wired microphone. At 6 months, some of it's functions died and I tried to get support. Philip's website has support options but none of them led me to a person. Their internet support was a waste of my time. I next tried the vendor I bought it from and was told that the product has a 90 day warrenty...not much given the cost of the product. I don't think Philips thinks much of it either! All the usual fixes-uninstalling, reinstalling, changing batteries, plugging the base into a different port, did not solve this. While I like the cord-free idea a lot (I am always tripping over microphone cords)I would not buy another product from Philips unless their services are radically improved.

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