How do you position your microphone?

Bruce

Try moving the microphone out of the path of your breathing, and the problem will likely vanish.

If this doesn't help, make a sound recording of silence, and try to figure out what that noise is that DNS is interpreting as spoken words.

Scott

That's what is interesting. The Dragon mic bar isn't "going into the green" when it thinks it is hearing something and yet small words dribble out. The microphone is about an inch to the right of the right corner of my mouth and a half inch from my face. I test how much breath is being captured by breathing heavy and looking at the microphone bar. I can breathe hard without any pulse at all registering on the microphone bar.

Go into the accuracy center and adjust your audio settings and when doing the first test talk louder than normal when reading. Do you ever see the VU meter go red?
tom
Dragon Reseller since 1989

First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for the help and comments.

I'm using one of those Creative Labs Sound Blaser Live! 24 bit sound card, an Andrea mic with the battery-powere signal strengthening box (forget the exact name).

I will try the cord shaking and recording tests tomorrow, when I am at the office again.

I do not observe the strange Eclipse behavior either when DNS is not running or when the dns mic icon is sleeping or paused.

I actually tried speaking loudly into audio settings. That did no good. But I did not yell so loud that the bar went red. I will try that again.

Can't type much more. Hands ache. (There is a reason I'm using Dragon!)

Yrs, Ara

is it broken? my take, Quintijn

SFAIK, Tom Westheimer is the most "pro" of people offering to help you, so I would give his suggestions priority.

Bruce

Okay, I have something. First of all, I noticed that my yellow bar is almost always fluctuating up and down, even if there is absolute silence in the room (even when I'm holding my breath -- my breath seems to make no difference). It is usually around half way to the distance at which point it would be a green bar. For those of you who have the optimal arrangement, when there is silence all around, is the yellow bar nowhere to be seen? Second, shaking the wire at any point causes the bar to land firmly into the green. However, the closer to the microphone itself that I jangle the cord (as opposed to the closer towards the computer), the greater the disturbance Is this supposed to be happening? When I play that back, I hear a giant crashing sound quite disproportionate to the meager sound of my stirring the cord. Might this be a source of the problem? Or might this be another symptom of the hypersensitivity?

Thanks again for all your help.

Oh yes, the battery box is the standard one you need to make the NC-95 work. As far as I can tell, it's not making the signal any louder. Or at least it's not supposed to be doing that.

Okay, I have more perplexing data for everyone. It turns out that I think I can solve my problem of the hypersensitive microphone, but at the expense of something in Dragon not quite working very well. You see, as a previous poster just said, it seems as if this microphone the Andrea NC-95 requires the APS-100 battery box to work with the SoundBlaster Live! soundcard. For kicks, I tried unplugging the battery box. It turns out that my dictation perceives just fine and the ambient sound being registered by my yellow bars is only a fraction of its former self. So why did I ever need the battery box to begin with? Well, when I check my acoustic settings, I can't seem to pass the speech quality tests without the box. It consistently fails. Because of that, at first, I supposed that I needed the battery box. This doesn't seem to be the case. I can get acceptable dictation without a "leaky" microphone, but now my speech quality tests consistently fails.

Even without the battery box, shaking the cord does cause the yellow bar to go into the green. So perhaps I still have a bad microphone, regardless of these other issues. But I think it is odd that the speech quality tests consistently fails even though my dictation is fine.

Thanks again for everyone's help.

I would just like to add as an addendum that the problem did seem to be my microphone. I've switched to a Sennheiser microphone and both the strange dribbling and the phantom commands have disappeared. They did seem to be related. As words dribbled, Dragon seemed to gravitate towards options on the menu bar. I don't fully understand Dragon's behavior here, but the Sennheiser's rock steady.