A great time saver is to use a portable digital recorder like the Olympus DS-4000 to capture your dictation when away from the office. When you’re next back in the office, connect the recorder to the PC, and arrange for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to convert your dictation to text.

In my tests, whereas I can achieve 98% accuracy when reading a standard passage with a good headset microphone, accuracy with dictation from the Olympus recorder when reading the same passage is lower but is still a respectable 96%.

Peter Maddern

If you are seeing some strange behaviour in MS Word such as:-

• “Select & Say” not available or not working properly
• No space between between your last utterance and next utterance
• Cursor occasionally moves around erratically
• the system locks up or freezes

 It could be as a result of Microsoft Window’s “Alternate User Input” which installs a background  process called CTFMON.exe which can interfere with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

 Scansoft Tech Note 3118 gives instruction on disabling CTFMON.exe as well as how to disable “Microsoft Speech” entirely.

CTFMON.exe if not disabled, may disable Dragon NaturallySpeaking’s MS Word add - in “dgnword.dll”

 Scansoft Tech Note 3059 gives instruction on re – enabling this add – in.

 Peter Maddern

An interesting article from the Scotland on Sunday saying all staff and MSP’s in the Scottish Parliament have been offered the chance to install Dragon NaturallySpeaking software.

Peter Maddern

I’d be interested to learn if anyone has made any estimates of the cost savings of using speech recognition software.

I was working recently with a leading Chartered Surveyor in London. He had purchased our wireless headset system with switcher to enable him to switch between Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software on the PC and his telephone. Read the rest of this entry »