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DNS v 10 package
Submitted by Dan Lufkin on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 15:52.
I just received an e-mail about release of v. 10 of DNS at $99.99 with a promo code. 20% more accurate, improved speed, voice formatting, etc. etc.
I looked at the link and saw that there's a package deal of v. 10 with a Plantronics Calisto Bluetooth headset plus USB adapter for $199.99. Checking the prices for the Calisto headset from various sources, that looks like a good deal. Any comments?
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Dan Lufkin wrote: I just
I just received an e-mail about release of v. 10 of DNS at $99.99 with a promo code. 20% more accurate, improved speed, voice formatting, etc. etc.
I looked at the link and saw that there's a package deal of v. 10 with a Plantronics Calisto Bluetooth headset plus USB adapter for $199.99. Checking the prices for the Calisto headset from various sources, that looks like a good deal. Any comments?
Dan,
just curious. From whom did you receive the e-mail?
Chuck Runquist
Former Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK & Senior Technical Solutions PM for DNS
"We are all victims of mythology in one way or another. We are the inheritors, and many times the propagators, of a desire to believe what we want to believe, regardless of whether or not it is true." -- J.V. Stewart
thoughts.... they are
thoughts....
they are breaking their NDA for one....
DNS v. 10 message
From Nua...@reply.digitalriver.com Here's the gist of it:
--------------------------
Dear DAN,
The world's best speech recognition software has just been replaced. That's right, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred ships in a matter of days. And while Version 9 was great, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred is faster, more accurate and includes an array of hot new features.
We did the impossible: The best is now even better.
With Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred, you'll save even more time and boost productivity like never before. That being said, we're currently bracing for our highest ever demand for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. As a valued customer, we're giving you the opportunity to pre-order now so that you'll receive your copy of Dragon as soon as it begins shipping on August 7th. After all, we don't want our best customers suffering through any of the anticipated delays. Here's more about Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred and why you shouldn't wait another minute to order.
Inspiration for advancements came directly from customers who use Dragon NaturallySpeaking every day. Number one on their wish list was accuracy. While the accuracy of your current version is excellent, our developers and engineers are never satisfied - and once again, they delivered huge improvements in recognition accuracy. The new release also makes major leaps forward in ease of use. Here are just a few of the ways the best is now better:
• 20% more accurate than Version 9.
• Significantly improved speed. Words now appear on screen in less than half the time.
• New Dragon Voice Shortcuts. Now you can collapse common tasks into simple voice commands so you can quickly search the Web and your desktop.
• Quick Voice Formatting. Delete and format text faster and more easily than ever.
• Great low price. Only $99.99 if you order before September 30, 2008.
----------------------------
Who could resist?
Dan
Advertising Hype
Nuance inside sales team starting calling registered users last week which effectively nullified the “Mums the word” issue for the rest of us. We have now received permission to discuss Ver. 10 because of the inside sales team jumping the gun.
That so-called $100 temporary upgrade price on Preferred isn’t likely to temporary. It is much more likely to be permanent as the SRP upgrade price on DNS Preferred has always been $99. We would be very surprised if this ‘special $100 deal’ really ends on Sept 30 or Preferred or for that matter, becomes available on August 7. We were informed that Preferred 10 was due to be released towards the end of August. This all sounds like advertising hype. You might also want to keep in mind that when you purchase from a certified licensed partner, you gain an extra layer of technical support. When you purchase from Digital River or directly from the manufacturer, you don’t get 2 layers of tech support. You just get you first free phone call and all Nuance partners will have every version of NaturallySpeaking 10 available at the same time. In other words there is no advantage to purchasing from Digital River other than the fact that they are the 1st to spam you. If we weren't in this business, we would make sure to purchase from the Nuance certified vendors who have been answering our questions for the last few years rather than the company that is just out to make a quick buck and have never offered free assistance but that's just our 2 cents worth.
We additionally recommend passing on the Nuance offer of a Bluetooth microphone.
Lunis Orcutt - Developer of KnowBrainer &
Host of the http://www.TheVoiceRecognitionStore.com
A Nuance Gold Certified Endorsed Dragon NaturallySpeaking Partner/Trainer
ALWAYS Ask If Your Speech Recognition Partner Is Nuance Certified
Plantronics Calisto
The plantronics Calisto is the new wireless headset in place of the 'old' CS60 in the Preferred Wireless box....
What is going on with
What is going on with Nuance?
I have just received an e-mail from Nuance UK offering me DNS 10. The e-mail states "As a registered Dragon customer, you are now eligible to take advantage of the following introductory offer: pre-order Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 10 today for just £ 79.99 [approximately $150] (a £ 20 savings). Your product will be shipped on August 20th, 2008.
This introductory offer is only available until September 15th, 2008." In addition "Special Bluetooth Bundle for only £ 80 Extra Purchase Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred 10 plus a Plantronics® Calisto™ Bluetooth headset with USB adapter…..ONLY £ 159.99 [approximately $308] (Regular retail price: £ 199.99 [approximately $384]" [ Of course in addition there is post and packing. ]
The first posting on this thread says its $99.99 (presumably US dollars).
However looking on the Nuance US site, there is not even a whisper about DNS 10. Are the UK and Canada specially privileged?
Obviously, for pricing reasons, I would be happier to pay the US cost
The last programme I bought from Nuance via Digital River only took about three or four days to cross the Atlantic.
I know the cost of living on our side of the pond is above that of the US, but this pricing in UK£ is ridiculous and a total take on, unless it is a full programme rather than an upgrade.
Any comments (particularly Graham Hendry).
Quentin
crivon1 wrote: What is
What is going on with Nuance?
The last programme I bought from Nuance via Digital River only took about three or four days to cross the Atlantic.
EMEA inc UK purchases from Digital River come from Ireland not from the US
dragonuser wrote: EMEA inc
EMEA inc UK purchases from Digital River come from Ireland not from the US
Where in Ireland, and if they are not far away, I will find them and see what is going on.
Quentin
Quentin, You should realise
Quentin,
You should realise by now that the last people to know about Nuance direct offers are Nuance UK Partners. The first I knew of this offer was an email from a customer asking if it was worth it. Up to yesterday we were prevented by NDA from even discussing DNS 10.
My customer was assured by Nuance sales that this offer was a full boxed version and not an update.
The advertising pdf says ONLY £79.99 - SAVE £20. This is interesting from the UK perspective as DNS 9 Preferred had an SRP of £149.99 while the Upgrade was £99.99. (These prices include VAT @17.5%.) Does this mean that the price for DNS 10 has fallen or that "Marketing" have got it wrong.
Note that shipping for the "cheap" offer is £17.08 extra.
As of yesterday our UK distributor had no idea when DNS 10 was to be released from manufacturing and no order codes or prices were available to them let alone UK VARs. As soon as we have clear information it will appear on the IT Speaking Web site. If Nuance follow the same pattern as in previous releases the Preferred boxed version will be available before the upgrades and before Professional/Medical boxes and upgrades.
The pdf advertising that I have in front of me says that the product (Preferred Offer) will ship on August 14th.
Unfortunately that is the sum total of detail that I have on pricing and availability.
Graham
www.itspeaking.co.uk
Nuance UK
To be fair do you think the Nuance UK sales team are kept up to speed as much as their US colleagues...
And by the way Nuance UK don't have a internal sales team - this is facilitated by others outside of the remit of the UK team...
Dragonuser Both fair
Dragonuser
Both fair points!
Unfortunately the end-users expect Nuance to operate in the same way across the globe and don't realise that there are separate arrangements and pricing structure in Europe and in N America.
For UK users who visit the N American forums and see discussions involving much lower $ prices it is understandable that there is a feeling that the UK is being "ripped off".
Graham
Bluetooth microphone
why do you recommend passing on the microphone offer with DNS 10?
Plantronics Calisto Bluetooth Mic
Rcrtaylor,
As
of yet, no manufacturer included NaturallySpeaking microphone, after Ver. 4,
has proven to be more than just a starter microphone. Nearly anyone who is
serious about speech recognition has to upgrade their microphone and although
it's possible that the Plantronics Calisto Bluetooth microphone might change
the status quo, judging from past Nuance microphone accommodations (especially
with the consumer versions of NaturallySpeaking) we cannot recommend the Plantronics
Calisto at this time but we have ordered one to test and it should be here next
week. It's entirely possible that we'll have to eat our words but what we're
saying is you might want to wait a few days for our review which will be
published 1st on the KnowBrainer
Speech Recognition Forums.
Lunis
Orcutt - Developer of KnowBrainer
&
Host of the
http://www.TheMicrophoneStore.com
A Nuance Gold Certified Endorsed Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Partner/Trainer
ALWAYS Ask If Your Speech Recognition Partner Is
Nuance Certified
Dragon 10 upgrade sales
Reading the thoughts from Lunis it had me thinking KnowBrainer would be offering Dragon V10 upgrade sales...
I sent a Dragon 8 buddy there and in his call he was told:
1) not taking pre-orders
2) full unit (no upgrade) sales only
So do we have an option besides placing orders direct?
TIA
Tcat
Tcat.net Training...Remembered (TM)
We Should've Thought of That :-)
We should be accepting advanced orders for DNS 10 by 8-6-08 but if
anyone wants to send us an e-mail we will put it in our upgrade folder and send
you an announcement as soon as the pre-order links are set up. Click KnowBrainer
to create a personalized e-mail in your favorite e-mail program and we will put
you on the list. We will also send you a 2nd e-mail with a link to our DNS 10
review as soon as we finished it.
Lunis
Orcutt - Developer of KnowBrainer
&
Host of the
http://www.TheSpeechRecognitionStore.com
A Nuance Gold Certified Endorsed Dragon
NaturallySpeaking Partner/Trainer
ALWAYS Ask If Your Speech Recognition Partner Is
Nuance Certified
DNS v. 10 etc.
In my line of work, a dose of DNS pays for itself in less than an hour. It's basically a miracle to begin with, so I'm not inclined to be overly captious.
I started with version 2 back in the late Bronze Age and the Dragon and I have gradually trained one another until we get along together like an old married couple. I plan to give v. 10 a test run as soon as it arrives (ditto the Bluetooth headset) and I'll let you know how it pans out.
Dan
Dan Lufkin wrote: .... and
.... and the Dragon and I have gradually trained one another until we get along together like an old married couple.
That is a bit of an ambiguous comparison
Quentin
The Dragon and I
Well, I chose the comparison deliberately. Speaking from the vantage point of 55+ years of marriage, I mean that the Dragon and I (like my wife and I) know both one another's strengths and weaknesses. I know how to avoid feeding the Dragon things he can't digest. The Dragon knows how to interpret my chronic mispronunciation of "edema" and "parenteral". Once in a while the Dragon is grouchy and slow to pay attention. Sometimes I'm tired and start mumbling. On the whole, though, we all get along fine. Just like marriage, speech recognition is a 60-60 proposition.
Dan (Sometimes my wife gets a little jealous of the Dragon.)
More on v 10
And just this morning I had a personal phone call from Jeff at Nuance to ask me if I would like to order version 10. When I told him that I'd already ordered, his gratitude knew no bounds.
Dan
I just got that e-mail from
I just got that e-mail from Nuance. Surprisingly, when you go to the Nuance website, there is no mention of DNS 10, and they're still selling 9.5.
Does anyone know if the offer includes the UK English language dictionary?
Quentin
Explanation
Quentin,
Nuance will not start advertising DNS Preferred 10 until it actually becomes available which should be August 20. The professional line of NaturallySpeaking is due out in early September. The original August 8 release date has been moved up to August 20 because of some internal snafus.
Lunis
You cannot be correct, as
You cannot be correct, as you will see that Dan has received a confirmation e-mail that his has been shipped, and the e-mail I received directly from Nuance US identical to the one received by Dan (as well as an earlier e-mail from Nuance UK) which does not indicate any delay in shipment.
I suspect they're trying to clear the existing stocks of 9.5 to the innocents who know nothing about 10 being issued to existing registered customers with earlier versions.
They're probably annoyed about the breach of the embargo.
Quentin
More on v 10
And just this morning I got an e-mail saying that my order has been shipped from Digital River. Once things start moving, they move fast!
Dan
Hmmmm
Dan,
I would be seriously surprised if Digital River actually shipped your order because my information on Preferred 10 is that it was quite literally finished no more than a few days ago if that and I'll be very surprised if they have had time to go to press, boxing and have shipped to distribution. Please post back and let us know if you actually receive your order before August 20. I only got my finished download copy yesterday.
Lunis
DNS v 10 good news and bad news
The good news is that my v 10 disk arrived via DHL this morning. The bad news is that it won't install and had tied my system into knots.
First off, the disk looks strange. It's deep indigo blue on the recorded side and the inner half of the recording is different from the outer half--sort of brownish while the rest of the disk is a deep blue. (I wonder if this is the blue-ray I've been reading about.) There's a pdf file on the disk with a user manual, but Adobe says it's corrupted and can't be displayed. The directory looks OK.
Anyway, the setup starts normally but finally comes up with an error message "A serious error occurred while initializing the NS speech engine. Please try reinstalling to correct this problem." The desktop icon shows up but NS won't run with the icon or with the program route. No info at all in the setup log. Trying to reinstall fails because there's a copy of NS 10 in memory that defeats the wiz. I can't de-install NS 10 through the control panel. You also can't shut down the machine through Windows; you have to hit the big switch.
I spent close to an hour with "Vince" at Nuance who took me through a great many back alleys in Windows, but without success. He said he'd send me an e-mail with an address to send the Dragon.log file to (there's 3 pages of stuff), but two hours later, nothing's shown up.
I think it's a bad disk. I'm gonna get back on the phone and see what's going on.
Meanwhile, take a good look at the disk if you get one. If it's blue, check out the manual file.
Dan
Maybe this is why Lunis said
Maybe this is why Lunis said he had heard it would be delayed a while?
Sounds like an odd disk though. Why would it be on a Blu-Ray though? I thought it still came on CD format disks. Is DVD format even an option?
Version 10 comes on a DVD
Version 10 comes on a DVD according to the Nuance FAQ found at http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/resources/...
It says there is an option to download the software if you do not have a DVD reader/player.
Dan, Blu-Ray refers to the
Dan,
Blu-Ray refers to the color/wavelength of the light used to write the disk -- it doesn't necessarily rub off on the disk
Didn't you have trouble with the DNS 9 install disk too?! If so, it might be a sign to wait a month or two to buy so they can work off the opening day "blues"
Bruce
"There's a pdf file on the
"There's a pdf file on the disk with a user manual,"
If it's anything like the DNS 9 disk the "PDF" file is not actually a PDF file - although it has the .PDF extension it is not actually a PDF - just a file that unfortunately shares that extension - nothing odd, just a bizarre bit of naming from Nuance...
And no its not bluray its a DVD - quite different.. you can only read bluray discs with a bluray drive not a DVD drive...
Quote: nothing odd, just a
nothing odd, just a bizarre bit of naming from Nuance...
When is "odd" not "bizarre"? There's a whole disquisition in that distinction, but maybe not for a family-oriented forum
I call it nutty as all get out!
Bruce
Yeah should have made that
Yeah should have made that clearer - what I mean is that there is nothing odd about that file, it is just a system file that Nuance have named with a .pdf extension - which is a bizarre naming convention, especially for a company that knows what a .pdf normally means...
Clearer? Na - didn't think so - I give up!!
DNS v 10 saga developments
Yeah, guys, I know about the actual meaning of Blu-ray (405 nm optics). I even know how the exit pupil of the recording beam is shaped by a diffraction plate to give an elliptical spot to maximize info density. (I worked on the original Phillips patent.)
After having thought some more about what I have, I've come to believe that the blue polycarbonate material of the disk I received and the change in color across the radius of the disk mean that it's a dual-layer DVD, which the DVD player on my 2003 Compaq won't read all the way. That explains nicely why my installation is missing a great many vital files.
I got an e-mail from ScanSoft this morning with an attached file spchapi.exe, which may fix the installation. If that doesn't work, they want some error-message screenshots and DNS logs.
Luckily, I keep a spare laptop with a pristine installation of DNS 9.5, so all this is a minor inconvenience.
I did have a problem with the ScanSoft PDF converter v 5, but DNS 9.0 and 9.5 were OK. There was a mysterious file on the PDFC distribution disk that Previx tagged as malware and that wrecked MS Outlook. I had to change over to Firefox, which fixed the problem as far as I was concerned. The ScanSoft customer service guy gave me an RMA and sympathy and showed every sign of knowing exactly what had happened, although the tech support guys had never, ever heard of such a thing.
More anon after I fool with the ScanSoft fix.
Dan
NUANCE - not Scansoft!!!!
NUANCE - not Scansoft!!!!
DNS v 10 saga final chapter
Well, I've gone through another week of struggle with DNS 10. After my last report, I received a message from tech support (Albert) with links to a Nuance v. 9 remover and an FTP version of the v 10 installer. I downloaded the installer (almost 3 hours on DSL) and the remover (couple of minutes), ran the remover (which involves quite a lot of laparoscopic surgery on the registry), then ran the installer as directed.
Surprise! The installer had a CRC error. Downloaded the installer again. First try had 1,313,852 bytes, second try 1,703,998 bytes. Ran it again. Unable to create a bunch of files. V 10 icon and activation screen appeared, but no action. Windows locked with DNS running as a process (nothing identifiable on TaskMan). Big switch time.
Wait, there's more! I also received yet another shipment from Digital River, this time a standard white DVD installer, the bundled Plantronics Bluetooth headset and some faux-PhotoShop s/w. So I tried the new DVD. Same result as the old blue disk and the FTP version. Thank Heaven for system restore! I'll take it back to the 4 August setpoint, when I started this madness, and pick up again with good old v 9.5.
I do believe that my best strategy just now is to get an RMA from Dig River, let v 10 mature in the keg for a few months and try again, maybe with a Vista system. (I'm now running XP Home v 5.1.2600 SP2.)
I'm feeling properly chastened after my initial hubris with being first on my block with the new version. I'd certainly appreciate any advice, and will even tolerate a reasonable amount of schadenfreude.
Dan
Dan Lufkin wrote: (I'm now
(I'm now running XP Home v 5.1.2600 SP2.)
Stick with this, and safely go to a SP3
Quentin
Dan Lufkin wrote: Well,
Well, I've gone through another week of struggle with DNS 10.
...
I do believe that my best strategy just now is to get an RMA from Dig River, let v 10 mature in the keg for a few months and try again, maybe with a Vista system. (I'm now running XP Home v 5.1.2600 SP2.)
I'm feeling properly chastened after my initial hubris with being first on my block with the new version. I'd certainly appreciate any advice, and will even tolerate a reasonable amount of schadenfreude.
Dan
Dan,
Bad news for latecomers like me, but there will probably be new recruits
Thanks for sharing your "experiences" with us all.
Bruce
The email to me advertising
The email to me advertising DNS Pref 10 came from digitalriver although it was plastered with Nuance logos. I received it because I was registered through DigitalRiver as a Paperport purchaser.
Stan
Nuance, ScanSoft,, who knows, who cares?
Well, all I can report is that the From field on the e-mail says: tech...@scansoft.com. The signature, on the other hand says "Regards, Albert, Nuance Technical Support."
Just ignore the curtain with that man behind it, Dorothy. Concentrate on the man.
Dan
Nuance...
Nuance...
Nuance
You are right about it being Nuance but they have been a little lax about updating some of their links. Check out the ScanSoft (Nuance) forum at http://support.lhsl.com/databases/dragon/webdisc.nsf/($All)?OpenView&Count=100 Note the “lhsl” in the address. This is left over from the L&H days which predate ScanSoft.
Lunis