Dragon naturally speaking?
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haridada
Senior Member
- Oct 9, 2008
- 1,000
- 385
here's my advice - don't waste your time, free or not , it is useless and nobody can convince me otherwise
I have given Dragon a chance and if you use it to type, it would take you three times longer to correct every single mistake and then you are better off just typing the whole thing
and you can train it for decades if you want to, you would still get the same crappy 60% accuracy and that's if you speak good English and have a clear voice
I have given Dragon a chance and if you use it to type, it would take you three times longer to correct every single mistake and then you are better off just typing the whole thing
and you can train it for decades if you want to, you would still get the same crappy 60% accuracy and that's if you speak good English and have a clear voice
thinkinghat
Regular Member
- Nov 27, 2009
- 492
- 471
same experience here
Mokodoki
Regular Member
- Feb 26, 2011
- 225
- 356
I used to think the exact same thing. I am a native English speaker with a southern accent, but I would say that my annunciation is pretty clear. To make it worse, I write in a strange niche a lot of times that has tons of acronyms and words that it doesn't otherwise know. Accuracy was awful!
BUT! It turns out it was my microphone. I went and picked up a fairly expensive microphone for gaming and when I replaced my old one, it was like magic. I'd say I got about a 95% success rate after about a week and now I only have to change a few things every now and again. A lot of it is teaching yourself how to speak (with punctuation) and speaking in a way that it can understand you. For me, a microphone made all the difference in the world and now I use it all the time.
This is with DNS11, by the way, as Dragon 10 was a terrible blight of a program.
Im thinking of buying this for Mac, what mike did you buy?
anyone else got good results?
DO you have an iphone or ipad? They offer their app for free. My advice is try it out for free with their app before you go messing around with the full blown version. The app only allows 1 paragraph at a time but you'll quickly see how difficult it is to dictate your articles from memory while recording. You end up with pauses, ummms, etc that you have to edit out. I believe it CAN be useful but you'd have to put in the time to learn to speak in the proper manner to min. errors. I found myself going off into tangents and my paragraph structures were all off... Also, use headphones with a MIC thats close to your mouth. This will improve it's accuracy by 10 fold IMO.
Mokodoki
Regular Member
- Feb 26, 2011
- 225
- 356
I'm running this on mac too. I use a Sennheiser ME3 with an adapter, but I use it for my digital piano, gaming, and Dragon so it's worth the investment to me.
For a cheaper solution, the VXI Tria V-DC isn't much to look at but has a really good accuracy for speech-to-text.
You absolutely can't get by using a mac's built in microphone though... as long as you don't pick up a $10 headset mic at Walmart, you should be pretty good.
Mokodoki
Regular Member
- Feb 26, 2011
- 225
- 356
You can train it to your voice but it will take much longer. How good is your annunciation? The less of an accent you have, the easier it will be. I'm Southern USA and I say some words a little strangely but I don't have problems since I trained it to my voice over time. The biggest thing with foreign accidents is that they tend to pronounce vowel sounds incorrectly and this will cause mass mayhem with whatever you are trying to say.
The mics that come packaged with DNS usually aren't very good at all to be honest. They have a marketing relationship and that is why those mics come with DNS, not because they're the best option. It's like affiliate marketers selling products they don't actually use. DNS recommends whatever mic will pay them the most to recommend, unfortunately.
Last edited:
englandrm
Senior Member
- Nov 11, 2010
- 942
- 440
I tried it for a little bit, and had decent results. Maybe it was because I was talking slow?
I wanted to pretend like I was Iron Man, and talk to my computer and have it do things for me. (it doesn't work like that).
Anyways, they have it setup so you can use it to play certain games. I haven't tried it but you can hook it up to really popular games, and do some of the actions using your voice.
I wanted to pretend like I was Iron Man, and talk to my computer and have it do things for me. (it doesn't work like that).
Anyways, they have it setup so you can use it to play certain games. I haven't tried it but you can hook it up to really popular games, and do some of the actions using your voice.
Autumn
Elite Member
- Nov 18, 2010
- 2,197
- 3,073
I've written over 2 million words with DNS over the past several years and I couldn't live without it.
Recommendations:
1) Get a good mic, as stated above Sennheiser ME3 is the shit.
2) Work in a quiet room and try to deaden echoes by shutting doors etc. No music and no fans in the room!
3) Set your volume properly by using the accuracy tools every time you start up.
4) Reboot your computer after every hour or so of writing - I don't know why, but accuracy tends to degrade the longer you leave the program running at a time.
5) Spend a lot of time training the program by reading the scripts provided. It definitely helps.
6) You need to feed in a LOT of your own text so DNS can learn your natural vocab usage and what words typically follow particular words.
7) Run the vocab and speech optimizers regularly at first.
8) Spend a few hours dictating and correcting the most common errors by voice, then re-running the optimizers. After this, just keep a note of words that DNS consistently gets wrong and train them individually when time permits.
9) It's generally faster to use DNS to dictate and then edit / correct by hand - but you won't get the training value if you don't do corrections by voice, which is why you initially should do corrections by voice until you get your accuracy up to a decent level.
10) Keep a mirror next to your desk so you can check your exact mic position in relation to your lips. You want the mic slightly below and to one side of your lips - not right in front. Exact mic positioning is a HUGE factor in the variations in accuracy you get from day to day.
11) Use the right regional accent setting for your voice (there are options for UK, Australian, Indian accents etc). I'm from New Zealand and I use the Australian accent option, and it works great. If I try to use US, the accuracy sucks.
12) If you consistently keep getting a word that comes out wrong, work around it by using words > properties and use a custom spelling for that word.
13) You have to speak in smooth sentences with a slight gap around each work, and speak crisply and clearly - it's definitely a skill you have to learn. DNS gets its accuracy by analyzing your words in context - if you just say single words, the accuracy will suck.
There's probably stuff I've forgotten, but if you work at it you can get the accuracy to 98%+. It's an amazing tool.
Recommendations:
1) Get a good mic, as stated above Sennheiser ME3 is the shit.
2) Work in a quiet room and try to deaden echoes by shutting doors etc. No music and no fans in the room!
3) Set your volume properly by using the accuracy tools every time you start up.
4) Reboot your computer after every hour or so of writing - I don't know why, but accuracy tends to degrade the longer you leave the program running at a time.
5) Spend a lot of time training the program by reading the scripts provided. It definitely helps.
6) You need to feed in a LOT of your own text so DNS can learn your natural vocab usage and what words typically follow particular words.
7) Run the vocab and speech optimizers regularly at first.
8) Spend a few hours dictating and correcting the most common errors by voice, then re-running the optimizers. After this, just keep a note of words that DNS consistently gets wrong and train them individually when time permits.
9) It's generally faster to use DNS to dictate and then edit / correct by hand - but you won't get the training value if you don't do corrections by voice, which is why you initially should do corrections by voice until you get your accuracy up to a decent level.
10) Keep a mirror next to your desk so you can check your exact mic position in relation to your lips. You want the mic slightly below and to one side of your lips - not right in front. Exact mic positioning is a HUGE factor in the variations in accuracy you get from day to day.
11) Use the right regional accent setting for your voice (there are options for UK, Australian, Indian accents etc). I'm from New Zealand and I use the Australian accent option, and it works great. If I try to use US, the accuracy sucks.
12) If you consistently keep getting a word that comes out wrong, work around it by using words > properties and use a custom spelling for that word.
13) You have to speak in smooth sentences with a slight gap around each work, and speak crisply and clearly - it's definitely a skill you have to learn. DNS gets its accuracy by analyzing your words in context - if you just say single words, the accuracy will suck.
There's probably stuff I've forgotten, but if you work at it you can get the accuracy to 98%+. It's an amazing tool.