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fatal flaws in NaturallySpeaking 9 a
Submitted by esj on Wed, 11/15/2006 - 05:22.
this evening I have been driven absolutely mad by a couple of failures in nine alpha. The first one lost of about a paragraph's worth of text. I was dictating into a "nonstandard window" application (Leo) and reflexively I corrected using normal natural speaking commands. What it reinjected the text, it wiped out a paragraph of data.
The second failure came after I decide to edit in Dragon pad. I re-create the paragraph I was writing and proceed to create another page worth of text when all of a sudden NaturallySpeaking goes Pop and vanishes without a trace except for the little systray microphone. this is not just a once in awhile occurrence. it happens fairly regularly after I start NaturallySpeaking after a reboot. In other words once every day or two.
Needless to say I am livid. Red in the face livid. The only reason I can think of that we put up with this kind of crap quality software is because we have no other choice.
Another example of crap quality at nuance. I have been using the Bluetooth headset from VXI. Absolutely wonderful product. I love it. If I have any choice I will never go back to a wire headset. Marty has been wonderful to deal with as I learn how to use this headset and work through various problems.
But every so often (i.e. six or seven times a day) recognition freezes and it just sits there forever and a day. If it does unfreeze I see a lot of small syllable words repeated over and over. When I listen to the audio, it's a buzz. It sounds a lot like very small samples of audio playing over and over and over again. I may be wrong but when I use the Bluetooth headset for Skype or other audio applications, it never sounds bad or has any hint of audio distortion. It's only when it's used with NaturallySpeaking do I get these kind of problems.
I can't live with this kind of instability. It is so bad, I am typing myself into serious pain instead of using speech recognition. The fear and anger that comes because you are at risk of losing your data with no recovery is untenable. at the very least, I need to find a decent editor (not Notepad/WordPad) that will work with NaturallySpeaking. Or hopefully, not deep six my work when NaturallySpeaking crashes.
I'm almost at the point where I am considering going to Vista just because if their speech recognition works, I can tell nuance to get out of my wallet.
esj wrote "The only reason I
esj wrote "The only reason I can think of that we put up with this kind of crap quality software is because we have no other choice. "
Of course you have another choice. Why not try ViaVoice 10.5.
If you make a copy of your DNS custom vocabulary, and then paste it into a Word or text file, you can analyse it with ViaVoice, thus saving all the hard work you had training new words.
Quentin
crivon1 wrote: esj wrote
esj wrote "The only reason I can think of that we put up with this kind of crap quality software is because we have no other choice. "
Of course you have another choice. Why not try ViaVoice 10.5.
If you make a copy of your DNS custom vocabulary, and then paste it into a Word or text file, you can analyse it with ViaVoice, thus saving all the hard work you had training new words.
Quentin
Two reasons: natPython, and giving nuance more money. Pay them once shame on them, pay them twice shame on me. As much as I detest Microsoft, at least they are subsidizing the salary of at least one person to pay active attention to accessibility needs with regards to speech recognition.
This is more than you can say for nuance or the at-spi open-source community. I will say the at-spi open source community is doing a good job for the blind. From their perspective, there just isn't enough demand to support disabled speech recognition users. We do a really lousy job at advocating for ourselves.
esj wrote: Two reasons:
Two reasons: natPython, and giving nuance more money. Pay them once shame on them, pay them twice shame on me.
I'm sure that Nuance has to pay some sort of licence fee to IBM. Therefore they will not be getting all of your money.
ViaVoice 10.5 can do almost everything that DNS Professional can do. In other words you pay less than the cost of DNS Preferred, but get the benefits of the much higher costing DNS Professional, including the ability to make any macros you want.
I use VV in all sorts of programmes without any problem, with a multitude of navigation and dictation macros I have made. In fact I could make a lot more, but I find it hard to remember the names of the existing macros as it is.
Quentin
ESJ, I understand your
ESJ,
I understand your frustration, but don't think your results are typical. I don't work in many non-standard windows, so don't use the Dication Box, but I understand the new version can be frustrating.
As far as ViaVoice goes, maybe it will work for you. But before you try it, understand two things.
First, Quentin is the only person on this forum who recommends it over NaturallySpeaking.
Second, I tried it once, and only once. It kept crashing. Now, I don't think my experience is typical, but by the same token I don't think Quentin's experience is widely shared.
In regard to the Dictation
In regard to the Dictation box issue, I have had significant problems with loss of information by clicking on the transfer button in version 9. I haven't personally had much luck with resetting the setting's option in the dictation box but have heard that checking the "simulate keystrokes" option in the paste function can be helpful. Instead, I created a three step command that will perform a cntrl a "select all", cntrl c "copy" and then "enter" to close the dictation box and insert the text. I named the command "Insert that" and use it when done dictating into the dictation box. It appears that the select all and copy functions actually fix the problem because I have not lost a single word since using this. Also, if the transfer function would fail, the text will be available on the Window's clipboard and a simple "paste that" command should retrieve your text. You can download my command from the post on Knowbrainer.com at the following link:
http://www.knowbrainer.com/PubForum/index.cfm?page...
As an additional suggestion, I need to disable my zonealarm antivirus and antispyware (leaving the firewall in place) while using DNS on a zonealarm equipped computer. I otherwise will see lockups with DNS that eventually resolve but only after a long delay and a period of high CPU activity. You may want to try disabling non-critcal software that could be causing a conflict with DNS.
Hope this helps