DNS 9.5 and Sony VAIO incompatability?
Submitted by speechty on Wed, 04/23/2008 - 14:09.
My office partner, a physician, has recently decided to give DNS a try in order to reduce dication costs. A vender is charging her $300 for a trial that is apply-able to purchase price. She purchased a new Sony VAIO desktop, Intel T2080, 1.75, 2 GB Ram, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400. The quality of her experience is worse than my fist version of DNS purchased in 1996-97. I am a fan of DNS (currently using v8), but the level of performance she is getting is truely useless. She completed 3 hour onsight training with the company at installation of the trial so she is not a completely naieve user who installed out of the box without assistance. The vender's 'tech' folks have said - off the record - that they have never installed DNS 9.5 on a computer as up to date technology-wise as her recent purchase, and that it simply is not working well. I am not all that tech wise, but they have said that the way sony stores sound files is the problem, adding that it is great for music but does not work well with DNS.???? Any guesses what is going on?
speechty wrote: My office
My office partner, a physician, has recently decided to give DNS a try in order to reduce dication costs. A vender is charging her $300 for a trial that is apply-able to purchase price. She purchased a new Sony VAIO desktop, Intel T2080, 1.75, 2 GB Ram, NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400. The quality of her experience is worse than my fist version of DNS purchased in 1996-97. I am a fan of DNS (currently using v8), but the level of performance she is getting is truely useless. She completed 3 hour onsight training with the company at installation of the trial so she is not a completely naieve user who installed out of the box without assistance. The vender's 'tech' folks have said - off the record - that they have never installed DNS 9.5 on a computer as up to date technology-wise as her recent purchase, and that it simply is not working well. I am not all that tech wise, but they have said that the way sony stores sound files is the problem, adding that it is great for music but does not work well with DNS.???? Any guesses what is going on?
First, the vendors tech folks need to go back to school. The system on which he has install DNS 9.5 is almost out of date. The processor is the slowest of the current technology available for laptops (Centrino mobile CPUs) even though the RAM is sufficient. In addition, anything below 2 GHz is using L2 cache well below for megabytes, which doesn't bode well for DNS. It's not that it won't work, it's that it will work significantly slower than if she were to have one of the new laptops running at 2.5 GHz with 6 MB of L2 cache. If Sony (or the vendor in question) things that the system that they sold her is up-to-date technology wise, I would question their technical expertise.
Nevertheless, there's no reason why DNS 9.5 should not work properly on that system unless it's configured wrong, and I seriously doubt that the sound files have anything whatsoever to do with it. The only issue with regard to the soundcard is that it may be suffering from electronic interference (EMF or EMI) due to poor shielding along with the fact that the out-of-the-box microphone provided with DNS is just a starter microphone and tends not to produce a very good Acoustic Model.
My suggestion would be not to change the microphone right away, but to avoid the built-in soundcard and go with a USB pod. Either the Andréa or Buddy USB 6G sound pod's would likely resolve a good deal of the problem. Nevertheless, the out of date technology of that particular laptop is going to result in slower performance in DNS. Personally, I don't like Sony as my feeling is their laptops are crap.
Regardless, I don't think that the problem was with the hardware. I think it has to do with the soundcard getting a significant amount of electronic interference due to poor shielding. I think that you're office partner would get significantly better results going to a USB pod, even if just for testing purposes. In addition, she needs to make sure the following:
1. Don't install DNS on a single hard drive that has multiple partitions. If the hard drive is set up with more than one partition, make sure that DNS is installed to the physical C drive.
2. Make sure that DNS 9.5 is installed to the default locations, at least for initial testing.
3. Tell her to get a tech with more than a high school education and who is properly trained on hardware and software.
Chuck Runquist
Former Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK & Senior Technical Solutions PM for DNS
"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." -- Mark Twain
I have DNS 9.5 with Vocola
I agree with Chuck.
I have DNS 9.5 with Vocola on an AMD 1.8 GHz Semperon with 1 Gb Ram, and 286 Mb L2 cache, it works fine (on the odd occasions I use it) using a USB SpeechMike.
I do have to say that I cannot understand why a "tech" is necessary for installation if the user is "not naive".
As KnowBrainer stated, there is no such thing as a trial version, and the user should not only look for her money back, but compensation for conning her and wasting her time.
Quentin
Sounds Suspicious
We concur with Chuck. It sounds like you're “so-called
certified” vendor is naïve to the point where they're just making up stuff to
cover their incompetence. If they were worth a grain of salt, their 1st move should
have been to replace the manufacturer NC-91 microphone with a better microphone.
Their 2nd move should've been to press the Play button in the last
stage of the Audio Setup Wizard to listen for possible interference and
almost assuredly replace the Sony integrated soundcard with a respectable USB
Pod.
I am a gold licensed/certified
NaturallySpeaking vendor and I've never heard of a trial version of
NaturallySpeaking. To my knowledge, NaturallySpeaking is not intended to be
marketed in this manner. I can understand if this vendor wants to recoup his/her
training costs but the client is supposed to purchase NaturallySpeaking up
front. The manufacturer offers a 30 day unconditional full refund so there is
no financial risk to the client. All things considered, you should probably
demand a full refund and consider reporting this vendor to Nuance because of
this vendor isn't bending the rules, they clearly sound less than qualified.
Nothing beats hands-on training but many
vendors now offer virtual on-site training which is very nearly as good and if
you want to save additional money, download our KnowBrainer Installation/Training
Guide. The "How Do I (Start)" chapter is designed for beginners.
99.9% of our customers decline our virtual on-site training because they have
our training guide and now, so do you.
Lunis Orcutt - Developer of KnowBrainer &
Host
of the Http://www.KnowBrainer.com Speech Recognition Forum
A Nuance Gold Certified Endorsed Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Vendor/Trainer
Thanks and clarifications
The computer is actually an all in one desktop, VGC-LS30 series, not a laptop, but the speed is indeed 1.73 GHz.
The trial is not a trial version of DNS per se, but a trial period with training and support. To me it sounds as though their success rate with new users has been so low, go figure, that they indeed had to find a way to recover there labor costs. "We are willing to sell you a great product with service, but if this doesn't work out so great after all, we still want $300." Oh, and by the way, the vender also offer traditional dictation services. Only a slight conflict of interest.
By not being naive I meant that the problem could not simply be that she installed and set up improperly, because she didn't do that, she is paying $300 for them to do that. She is indeed computer naive, but that is not the source of the problem.
All comments have been helpful. Thanks
Suspicious Activity
As
we mentioned earlier, there is no such thing as a trial version or a trial
period of NaturallySpeaking because the serial number is required for
installation. You can fudge the serial number by just typing the 1st 2 digits
correctly and making up the rest of the number but you'll only be able to run
DNS 5 times in this manner. It sounds like your vendor is planning on
uninstalling DNS and hoping that the Nuance server gives him back an activation
but this simply doesn't always work and this may be one of the reasons why
customers occasionally report not being able to acquire all 10 of their activations.
Nuance does not permit temporary installations and licensed Nuance vendors are
not even permitted to take back opened DNS software. ONLY the manufacturer can
issue a 30 day full moneyback guarantee and it sounds like your vendor is
operating outside the constraints of his contract and we strongly recommend
reporting them to Nuance (800) 443-7077.
Lunis Orcutt - Developer of KnowBrainer &
Host
of the Http://www.KnowBrainer.com Speech Recognition Forum
A Nuance Gold Certified Endorsed Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Vendor/Trainer
By not being...
By not being naive I meant that the problem could not simply be that she installed and set up improperly, because she didn't do that, she is paying $300 for them to do that. She is indeed computer naive, but that is not the source of the problem.
It seems her Computer Experts were not so expert. There is no excuse for poor results when proper hardware is used and basic training (see New User tips below) is applied.
I also think the poor results must have been due to a poorly shielded sound card allowing electronic noise to enter the audio stream.
SUGGESTIONS TO REACH HIGH ACCURACY QUICKLY USING DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING
1. Read, "Key Steps to High Speech Recognition Accuracy" at:
http://www.emicrophones.com/docDetails.asp?DocumentID=38
2. Go to our Links/Articles page at:
http://www.emicrophones.com/articles/index.asp
Listen to the three sound files on How to Sound and How Not to Sound. Essentially, it may be continuous speech, but it is not conversational speech you need to master. Each word must be enunciated clearly. Speaking in phrases, helps the system because the system is listening not only for the sounds of words but comparing each word to words before and after for context clues.
3. http://www.emicrophones.com/faq_answer.asp?contentID=69
The above link in our Dragon NaturallySpeaking FAQ or frequently asked questions section, tells you the proper way to create a new user profile including when to add your typical documents (not during the training phase).
4. When you begin to make corrections, make corrections within the context of at least one other word. This will improve the speech profile as relates to your particular style of speaking and will increase the probability that the word will be recognized correctly the next time you speak it.
--
Martin Markoe, eMicrophones, Inc.
The best microphones for Speech Recognition