AutoHotkey Community

I switched to e-Speaking (aka Say-Now) Voice Recognition Software. It's supposed to be worse than Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Pro, but for me it works better. That is, I use it only to launch commands and hotkeys (e.g. close window, open firefox, close tab, go to my computer, ...) and for that purpose it works quicker and with greater accuracy than dragon ever did, plus custom commands are easier to add. the program is only 2 MB (installer size), but uses Microsoft Windows 2000/XP Speech API for the heavy lifting. It's free for a month, and then $14 to activate.

p.s. Not sure if it works for Vista or 7, but I hear they have good built-in voice recognition support anyway.

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Hardware: 1.8 GHz laptop with 4 GB ram, Windows XP/SP3
Software: Prevx, Privatefirewall, KeyScrambler.

Well, I once heard MS's speech recognition engine is supposed to be as good as Dragon's. It's the front end that's the bugbear. I don't understand why it hasn't been further developed so far.

Meanwhile, I've purchased the pro version of Dragon, and just last night installed a solid state drive in my laptop specifically for improved performance with Dragon. No virtual memory, no hiberfile, all startup services deactivated and a new SSD, this thing is pretty fast now.

BTW I intend on resuming with my little DragonPad² project. Been busy getting married and such over the last two months, and my poor ahk skills have suffered as a result.

Here's the review where I first learned about e-Speaking: http://voice-recognition-software-revie ... index.html

Their accuracy score (% of correct transcription in dictation tests) was 93% for Dragon and 92% for e-Speaking (Microsoft SAPI). That's so close that I'm guessing it could go either way based on individual voice factors.



Sounds like a sweet system and DNS 10 Pro is the best voice recognition software by almost all accounts on XP at least. In my case it just never really clicked. There was always a slight delay in command execution for some unknown reason, so I would end up pressing hotkey for the command (I'm impatient) when I wasn't training Dragon, and then eventually I wouldn't even turn Dragon on anymore because using voice commands would just slow me down and therefore I never used them. I tried various tweaks to speed it up - I used UltimateDefrag to move all Dragon files to fastest area of my hard drive and later moved the AppData folders to a ram drive. I installed a task management tool to give high priority and greater CPU affinity to Dragon processes and lower priority/affinity to all other non-critical processes. But the program just didn't like me or my laptop. I wish you better luck.



Congratulation on the marriage!

Do you plan to use the DragonPad² with DNS Pro, or are you just doing it for the benefit of those with DNS Standard or Preferred?

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Hardware: 1.8 GHz laptop with 4 GB ram, Windows XP/SP3
Software: Prevx, Privatefirewall, KeyScrambler.

The slight delay you refer to is I think pretty much how Dragon is. Dragon's strength is in dictating a stream of words, rather than making single commands. My DragonPad² program is designed specifically as a workaround for that issue, as much as anything else. You make up words, assign them to ahk commands instead of Dragon commands and train those words in Dragon. DragonPad² checks for those words at your designated interval and executes the command when it finds them. It does a few other things but that's the major reason for it.

I tried the RAM drive also, BTW, and installed Dragon to it. Slowed Dragon down.
Thanks! The wife is driving me nuts!

No, but it will work with Standard or Preferred indefinitely unless I say otherwise. The big advantage of the pro version is still the fact that you can save work in progress and correct and train recognition errors any time later. And if you're transcribing into Dragon for hours at a time, that's what you likely want to do, most likely.

BTW, remember when I asked permission to distribute your clipboard program? I know you've done more with it since then but anyway here's the link: http://metatranscript.com/freewarepage.htm#PJs

Doesn't seem to work with DNS 11 Premium. I'm trying some different things to find out what.

If you change the first if line to this:

if (StrA<>"DgnResultsBoxWindow1"){

it works in Dragon 11 for commands, but still inserts the symbol into text.

I got it working with DNS 11 but it's a hack.

Besides changing the aforementioned line in the script, you can leave out the second script (which I couldn't get working anyway, DNS must be inserting text some other way) by doing the following:

- Add all your text commands as plain text and use a common character like Z (1 character only) as the text.

- Open the MyCmds.dat file (C:\ProgramData\Nuance\NaturallySpeaking11\Users\[username]\current in a hex or text editor that won't ruin the file.

- Search for the Z's that are in your command definitions (careful not to change anything that's not a command definition, i.e. the Z should be near your command name.

- Change the Z to a nul character. (00 in hex, I use NotePad++ to type a nul using ctrl-shift-2.) Note that you can't copy and paste a nul in windows.

It's a pain but it works really well now. I find DNS is faster and better than what's built into Windows Speech Recognition, plus you can turn on and off the dictation easily.

A note to Nuance: please update Premium to allow launch of external commands. Even allowing sending of key combos would be a good start. I can understand why you bar scripting and charge more for a professional version, but I'm not willing to pay $500 (which I'm paying out of my own pocket, company is not paying for it) when there are some pretty good free or near free alternatives out there. I am willing to champion your software but the lack of such an ability is something that keeps me from doing so.

Forgot to mention, always back up your MyCmds.dat file first, before making changes. DNS is very picky about this file changing outside of itself and will not load it more often than not.

Also, you must have the 'current' window closed when closing or opening DNS, it thinks the file is in use if it's open.