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Dragon 9.5 won't capitalize the first letter of a sentence
Submitted by Rockgirl1 on Tue, 01/22/2008 - 19:19.
Is anyone else having this problem? I saw the Know Brainer Quick Tips suggestion for this problem but it won't work for me because when I open my Vocabulary Editor there is no red star next to the "." When I checked the properties, the selection to capitalize and leave a space was already selected. This only happens to me in Word and Outlook. It does not happen in the Dictation Box. All of my Auto Correct features are all in and Word in Outlook. Does anyone have any ideas?
Several Options
This is a fairly common NaturallySpeaking
problem but there are some workarounds:
The next time this ugly problem presents
itself in Microsoft Word or Outlook, try closing Outlook and Word and then
reopening them. Note that these
programs often stay open when you attempt to close them so you will probably
want to verify that they are closed by opening the Task Manager to the Processes
tab and End Tasking Winword and Outlook if they are still running. In many situations, the problem will rectify
itself when you re-launch the program and always remember to launch
NaturallySpeaking before opening Microsoft Outlook or Word.
If re-launching Word and Outlook fails to produce the
desired results, you can resort to saying Cap before the 1st word in a
sentence but this isn't exactly user-friendly. If you're using KnowBrainer
2007 you can say Resume to force the 1st letter
of the 1st dictated word to appear in Title Case. You can even use the Resume command from the middle of a paragraph because
it automatically repositions the cursor to the end of the paragraph. If you're correcting a word or phrase in
the middle of a paragraph you can substitute Resume <1to10> for choose <1to10>. Example: If you select a misrecognized phrase and substitute Resume 2 for choose 2 KnowBrainer will grab the 2nd choice, move the cursor
back to the end of the current paragraph and force the 1st letter of the next
dictated word to begin with a capital letter. This isn't a cure but it's not
a bad workaround while we wait for the Nuance developers to come up with a better
solution.
Additional responses to this question are available on the
KnowBrainer
Technical Support Forum
Thanks
Yes, it seems better today just by having simply rebooted my computer from yesterday. Let's hope those Nuance developers get crackin! Thanks again!
Rockgirl1 wrote: Yes, it
Yes, it seems better today just by having simply rebooted my computer from yesterday. Let's hope those Nuance developers get crackin! Thanks again!
Just FYI. This issue has a long history of discussion on this forum and others. There are several reasons why this occurs. I would recommend that you search the forum on the capitalization issue(s). You'll find that there are a number of reasons why capitalization fails. Most of the reasons are because of changes that were made in DNS 9.
BTW, the Nuance developers are well aware of this issue and a number of others, such as the roaming results box. You don't have to worry about them getting cracking. Most of them are my personal friends with whom I worked directly during my tenure as Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK and Technical Solutions Project Manager for L&H and with whom I communicate these issues directly whenever they arise. These folks are some of the best programmers in the world and most of them have been at it for a long time (i.e., at least 5 of them have been with DNS since Dragon Systems first released DNS 1.0 – 1991).
In your case, the reason why you are having a problem was because you likely started DNS after you launch Word and Outlook. You can't do this. This is why the QuickStart is there. DNS has to link to these applications. Therefore, if you load Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook and then load DNS, there is no link to this Select-and-Say add-ins. Rebooting solve the problem because the links were apparently reinstated. Nevertheless, always load DNS first before you load applications, particularly if they are Select-and-Say enabled. Otherwise you'll have this problem.
The other problem with capitalization is that you cannot have customized punctuation in your vocabulary for anything that is considered terminal punctuation (period, comma, question mark, or exclamation mark). In DNS 9, adding custom punctuation that duplicates terminal punctuation was prohibited because it resulted in just this problem in previous versions. Therefore, and Nuance developers decided to nip this in the bud and prevent duplicate (custom) terminal punctuation from being added to the Vocabulary Editor. Most users saw this problem as a result of earlier versions of DNS automatically adding custom punctuation to the Vocabulary Editor. When they upgraded their previous version users, for custom punctuation that was added in the previous version user was retained, but not visible in the Vocabulary Editor because DNS 9 prevented it from being displayed. Nevertheless these custom terminal punctuation vocabulary entries from the previous version are still there and you cannot delete them because you cannot see them. This clause the problem that capitalization of the first word after terminal punctuation worked fine until you went back to a previous dictated entry and attempted to insert something after the terminal punctuation mark. The results of going back and editing under this condition resulted in the capitalization of the first word after that terminal punctuation mark not being executed. The only solution to this was, and is, to export your custom words and custom macros from this user, create a new user and import your custom words and custom commands. In addition, don't attempt to add any additional custom punctuation for any of the terminal punctuation entries or you will be right back where you started. DNS prevents this using the same written/spoken forms for these terminal punctuation marks. However, any number of users attempted to create them with different spoken forms only to find out that the entire capitalization issue returned with a vengeance.
Chuck Runquist
Former Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK & Senior Technical Solutions PM for DNS
"Problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." – Albert Einstein
Thanks Chuck!
I really appreciate your detailed response, thank you so much. I actually spent about three hours looking for threads concerning this and had no luck. For what it's worth, while I am so thankful for Dragon I've actually had several pretty terrible experiences with Nuance itself. Overall, they've been unbelievably unhelpful. It's very frustrating, as you know, when all you want to do is to be able to use the computer like everyone else. And Dragon, though wonderful, is really not intuitive. I can only imagine if someone with a more severe disability then me was trying to use it... if the point is to help people, my experience has been that the people who help the most are people like you... not Nuance. Anyways, thanks again for all of your insights. Very best, Kate
Inappropriate capitalization
I seem to be having the opposite problem, in that the first letter of the first word of any utterance that I try to interject into the middle of a sentence is being capitalized with v. 9.5.
To prevent this from happening, I must repeatedly preface a new utterance with the command "No Caps" to keep the next letter from being capitalized, whenever I moved the cursor to a new spot.
A "new" utterance, in this case, is any word that I dictate after a key-stroke or screen-flip or whatever activity I do that disrupts the flow of verbal input.
I can pause for any length of time between utterances, without the inappropriate capitalization occurring on the first letter of the next word, once I resumed dictating, as long as I to do anything with a keyboard or mouse.
This is happening regardless of whether I have started DNS before any other apps or not.
Interestingly, this is happening only with Vista as the OS, whereas it is not a problem with 9.5 on XP.
Thanks for any suggestions.
MarkO
Hey Mark, I've had similar
Hey Mark, I've had similar problems and I think there's a couple of things you can do. First, go to www.knowbrainer.com and download their "quick tips." That is the Bible, I use it all the time for lots of Dragon fixes. It sounds to me like you need to remove ctfmon from your computer which the quick tips will tell you how to do, I can't remember under one heading but you can do a search for "ctfmon" and find it. Once you do this, it actually may or may not fix your problem but either way you want to always make sure ctfmon is removed because it seems to cause all kinds of havoc. So first I do that and then when that doesn't work, which is often the case, you want to uninstall and reinstall. If that doesn't work, you'll want to uninstall and reinstall but this time, instead of using your current speech files and reloading them, you want to go back to the last time your speech files weren't poisoned which is what has happened. So basically, every month I keep track of my speech files by date so I can always go back. And even that doesn't sometimes works so I have to start fresh and create an all-new speech file. It's a pain in the butt but it's better than dealing with the quirks and if you export all of your new words and commands and then import them again it's actually fairly painless. Hopefully this makes sense, if not, you're welcome to e-mail me at K...@Outlandosmusic.com and I will try and help you more. I know how frustrating it is, believe me
.
CTFMON.exe
Kate,
Thanks for the quick reply and suggestions.
I checked out the KnowBrainer quick tips (they're great!) and found my way back to the SC/WSMC reference below.
I could not find CTFMON.exe among the files by using the Task Manager or the Search function of the Start menu.
So, it appears that CTFMON.exe has already been deleted from Vista, when I changed a lot of the settings to improve speed at the expense of appearance.
I will try reinstalling DNS and creating a clean user file, to see if that fixes the problem, since I probably overtrained it, before I knew that too much training is a bad thing.
Thanks again.
Mark
CTFMON.exe in relation to Dragon NaturallySpeaking
We think that 99% of the population would be better off without this utility but you can take our recommendation for a test drive before making a commitment. Just open the Task Manager to the Processes tab, left-click CTFMON.exe and click the End Process button. This should eliminate the CTFMON.exe utility until you reboot Windows.[1]
Ctfmon is only necessary for alternate user input (Window Speech Recognition or handwriting support – tablet PCs)[2]
References
Lunis Orcutt post dated 01/22/2008
Chuck Runquist post dated 01/22/2008
ctfmon remover
Kate,
I dug a little deeper into KnowBrainer and came up with the following link to remove ctfmon:
http://www.gerhard-schlager.at/en/projects/ctfmonremover/
After running the program, it indicates that ctfmon is now toggled off, but the new utterance capitalization situation persists.
When I have the time to put into it, I will uninstall/reinstall DNS.
Thanks for the tip about exporting and importing my vocabulary and commands, should I need to start a new user file.
Mark
persisting
Hey Mark, yes, I've used that remover as well. Sounds like your files are definitely corrupt. It happens to me all the time, you get to recognize it quickly... so it's not even worth troubleshooting, just dump your files and start again. You probably already do this but those files are pretty big as you now so it's good to have an external hard drive to keep them on. In fact I'm so paranoid I keep them in several places. Just always know exactly where your most recent non-corrupted file is in case of corruption. But starting over from scratch is actually really a piece of cake, especially if you have those commands and words. And also, as you know, troubleshooting can take forever so the next time you start over if you happen to notice the capitalization thing, stop immediately, don't even bother troubleshooting, copy your words and commands, remove Dragon, reinstall Dragon, and then use your most recent known good speech files or start from scratch. That takes only about half an hour as opposed to troubleshooting which could be several hours... and who has the time? LOL one more thing, defrag often.