Re: Dragon NaturallySpeaking v10 W2K Xywrite

[Harry Binswanger hb@xxxxxxxx]

Flash,
1. You say it uses as much RAM as there is, then you talk about using it
with different amounts of RAM--does that mean you tried it with different
*physical* amounts of RAM? Or is there some setting?
2. I haven't found NatSpeak to work well with Xy, in that it doesn't
recognize commands. Ideally, you'd want it to have voice-activated versions
of BC ,XD ,DF etc. But lacking that, I can't go to the command line, do a
correct selection, set formats, etc. I'm betting there is some place in
NatSpeak that you can define the byte-level output of a spoken word, and
via that we could make NatSpeak Xy-friendly. As it is, I use NatSpeak in
Windows programs, such as Eudora and Word. But, I blush to admit, I'm not
using NatSpeak much at all, or not yet.
> Y'all,
> Here's an update on using speech-to-text with our favorite word processing
> program. Dragon uses up as much RAM as there is, and they recommend a
> minimum of one GB. I first tried using it with 750 MB, and found that it
> ran slowly. It is now running more happily with two GB. It will merrily
> dictate text into XyWrite, although some supplementary features are not
> available in Dragon to XyWrite; for example some voice commands. It works
> well with T'bird e-mail program, and can even transfer text to programs
> such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop by means of a separate transfer
> pad. The headset which delivered with the standard version is pretty
> uncomfortable but the program will work with almost any headset or halfway
> decent microphone. If you don't need to hear playback then of course a
> microphone without earphones will be adequate. The program is trainable,
> and you can manually edit the dictionary. Getting it to work is
> straightforward: you start the program, activate the microphone, and then
> start any other program into which you would like to dictate text: simply
> set the cursor where you want the text to begin, and start talking. The
> text just flows right into your destination program, be it XyWrite or
> e-mail or whatever. You can make corrections on the fly or later on, as
> you wish. This e-mail for example was entirely dictated using Dragon. It
> does however make a few mistakes. For example, when I say obscured it
> writes up skewered, or at any rate it did until I trained it assiduously.
> Yes, it recognized the final word in the previous sentence; I did not have
> to correct that. It confuses homonyms: profit and prophet, to, two and
> too, etc. (this sentence I had to correct manually) [Note to Auerbach: now
> here's a good example of a self-referential sentence]. I will find it very
> useful for translating from German to English on-the-fly, and for quoting
> long passages of text (my flatbed scanner does not have an OCR function).
> I have not yet figured out how to format spoken text bold or italic in
> XyWrite, but maybe Harry has figured this out for us already.
>
> Cheers,


Harry Binswanger
hb@xxxxxxxx