hi all,
i thought i should forward this thread along; i posted it on the more general dragon forum.

thanks for any help!

************

Hi all,
Im new to this forum, and to speech recognition software, and Im having trouble training Dragon 8 (spanish version) to my voice. I imagine it´s similar in the English version. What happens is that I´m supposed to repeat a phrase ("welcome to the world of Dragon," but in spanish), but I´ve repeated it continuously for more than 5 minutes, and it never seems to move on to the next steps of the training. The instruction manual isn´t very helpful on this point.

Does anyone know how long you´re supposed to go on repeating this phrase, and-or if I´m doing something totally wrong?

Thanks,
Eric

Eric,

You're not doing anything wrong. Here are some suggestions.

1. If you can't get a phrase accepted during training, use the skip button. It is not absolutely essential that Dragon NaturallySpeaking recognizes everything that you say as long as you can proceed through the training with a minimal number of skips.

2. If you have to skip every phrase or every other phrase, or skip frequently specific points during the training, there is something wrong with your user profile. It basically means that your sound card and microphone are not clearly picking up what you are saying. This is generally a hardware problem. You should use the Windows sound recorder to determine whether or not what you say is coming through clearly and that you are not getting any low or high frequency distortion. Another way of determining this is in the Audio Setup Wizard for DNS. What is the relationship between the yellow bars and the green bars when you do the quality check. Also, each of the individual vertical green bars/yellow bars represents a particular frequency level (low-frequency to the left high frequency to the right). DNS records at a sampling rate of 11.025 kHz 16-bit Mono. This translates into an overall frequency range between 200 Hz and 5 kHz, which is the normal frequency range for human speech. You can use this rough gauge to determine where, if any, you are getting distortions. The higher the yellow bars coupled with minimal distance between the green and yellow indicates either distorted reception or noise. Also, checked the quality check ratio, or Speech-to-noise ratio. You should be getting between 17 and 24. Unless you are using an ANC (Active Noise Canceling) microphone, note the following the closer that your quality check ratio gets to 17 the poorer the quality of your dictation as recognized by DNS. Below 17 is very close to not passing (at or about 15). As long as you are getting between 17 and 19 (ANC microphones such as the Andréa 700/750 series) or between 21 and 24 (standard noise canceling close talk microphones), you are probably doing OK.

However, regardless of #1 and #2 above, my suspicion is that the quality of your speech as recognized by DNS is probably not optimal. To have DNS except at least the initial welcome text is highly unusual, and usually reflects a problem with either your hardware or your enunciation.

Chuck Runquist
Former DNS SDK & Senior Technical Solutions PM for DNS
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Hi Chuck, Thanks for your
Submitted by geograffias@yah... on Thu, 10/19/2006 - 17:49.

Hi Chuck,
Thanks for your detailed response. I know I posted the original message a long time ago, but I'm just know getting a chance to try, once again, to set up my dragon spanish version.

I don't seem to have Windows sound recorder, but I tested the mic audio set-up through Toshiba's configure microphone set-up program. It doesn't provide any numerical ratings or readings, but my mic setup passed, anyway.

Also, in my Dragon, in the first training voice test, there is no "omit"; there is a "back" and "forward," which i suspect could bump me to a next test, but they are grey, and unclickable. The sound readings in the test are registered by one horizontal bar. When I don't speak, the bar is yellow, and reaches about one third of the length of the total possible. When i speak, it turns green, and reaches about half way to the total.

I've tried the process again, and I simply repeat the same phrase, for more than five minutes, and nothing ever happens.

Thanks for any advice!
Eric
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