I've had this Dell Inspiron 570 for about a year now, with an quad core Athlon II 630 w/2 MB L2 cache, and was having latency issues with Dragon on and off. Frequently switching between programs and speaking commands would hang Dragon for random amounts of time (up to half a minute!),and actually just working within a program would give me random latency issues. 

so I found this forum, and learned about cache, and made the CPU jump up to the quad core phenom II 925 with 6 MB of L3 cache. no improvement at all.

Do I need to reinstall Dragon 11 for it to make use of this L3 cache now??

ps. What I did notice change the latency issues ( but not eliminate) was my USB configuration. I have six USB ports ( all 2.0 I believe, but not sure), using 1 4-port hub. in total about seven USB devices plugged in, including my Logitech USB headset. I've always kept my microphone plugged into the back, in its own port, but notice latency a slight bit less when the USB cables were switched around in the back.

I'm definitely considering upgrading to an i7 2600k system, but why can't I get this one to work???

Mark,

The question I would put to you is how did you make the CPU jump and did you uninstall DNS 11 before making the jump, and then reinstall after? Sometimes this can have an inadvertent negative effect. Whenever changing your hardware it's always advisable to uninstall DNS before doing so and then reinstall afterwards.

Without having a copy of your Dragon log, it's difficult to pinpoint where the problems may be coming from. Nevertheless, simply upgrading your CPU isn't going to solve most of them anyway, particularly if they're related to either your user profile or problems with your DNS install.

If you're going to post a copy of your Dragon log, in ordered for us to be able to view it, you should drag a copy of it to your desktop and then rename it from Dragon.log to Dragon.txt. The Dragon log is a standard ASCII/ANSI text file, but we can't view it if the extension on the attached file is *.log. You must change the extension to *.txt in ordered for us to be able to open and review it. Accessing your Dragon log can be done by going to the Start menu | All Programs | Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 | Show Dragon log.

No, reinstalling Dragon 11 is not necessary for this purpose. Your L3 cache is entirely accessed and controlled by the CPU. Use of your L3 cache doesn't require any action on your part or any action with regard to any application. It is automatically used. The only reason that you might need to or want to reinstall Dragon 11 is in the case where you might have a problem with the program installation itself, which running a repair or a complete uninstall/reinstall using the Dragon 11 remove utility (Dragon11remover.exe) might be advisable. However, remember if you use the Dragon 11 remove utility, you need to export your user profile first because the remove utility will remove everything including your user profiles and unless you have exported it to somewhere else, you would lose that. Also, don't run the Dragon remove utility until after you have uninstall properly being connected to the Internet so that you don't lose an activation. If you simply run the Dragon 11 remove utility without properly uninstalling DNS 11 first and recovering your activations, you will lose one activation.

It is unlikely that switching USB ports had anything to do with the change in latency issues. The only thing that may have happened is that it might have reduced any hardware interrupt conflicts, or eliminated them. Remember, your microphone requires (USB) a USB port that is dedicated only to the microphone and does not share hardware interrupts with any other USB port or hardware. There are only so many dedicated hardware interrupts. Generally speaking, USB ports 0 through 5 are assigned dedicated hardware interrupts. After that, USB ports 6 through whatever are usually assigned shared hardware interrupts. This will cause a conflict between your microphone and whatever other peripherals are sharing that hardware interrupt. Some of these will have minimal impact, such as printers. Some of these will have major impacts and may even cause your microphone to stop working at all, particularly relative to USB mice. Your microphone should always be inserted in USB 0, which is the first USB port on the back side of system usually the one immediately underneath the RJ-45 ethernet port.

One thing that can contribute to latency issues is the quality of your microphone/soundcard combination. Logitech USB microphones are generally not the best for speech recognition. If your microphone isn't performing up to snuff, and by that I don't mean in terms of accuracy because accuracy is not the issue here, then you may suffer performance hits (latency and other performance issues). Why is a long story. Suffice it to say that the microphone/soundcard combination plays a prominent role not just in terms of accuracy, but overall in terms of performance.

Again, if you will attach a copy of your Dragon log as specified above, it may be possible to see what some of the issues that may be preventing you from getting better performance.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower® Ultimate

If there's more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then somebody will do it that way.  (variant of Murphy's law - Edward A. Murphy, Jr.)

Hey, Chuck,
thanks for the quick reply, here's the Dragon log.

I run Vocola 2 and Unimacro NatLink version: 3.9mike. Every month or so I run chklnks.exe to remove dead links. I would like to upgrade microphone/soundcard, but I have not decided on getting a PCI card or USB pod.

thanks for the help

Dragon.txt  (15 KB)

Mark,

DNS is spinning its wheels. Every time you dictate an utterance you get one or more instances of the following before the next utterance is accepted.

22:56:32 SigQual[ uD 1052 | Nd 0 | sN 27 | cD 0 | wF 0x00 | aF 0x00 | dA 0.0 [61820] | sA 27.6 [61820] | Rt C ]
+ CDgnSRNotifySink:aused
... enter Paused 024c 0602
- CDgnSRNotifySink:aused
+ hiddenWndProc WM_PAUSED
... enter on onPaused 024c 0602
+ CDragonCode::onPaused doPausedProcessing
... enter doPausedProcessing 024c 0602
+ CDragonCode::getCurrentModule
  CDragonCode::getCurrentModule 1
  CDragonCode::getCurrentModule 2
  CDragonCode::getCurrentModule 3
  CDragonCode::getCurrentModule 4
  CDragonCode::getCurrentModule 5
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing beginCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing beginCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
+ CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
- CDragonCode:oPausedProcessing grammarCallback
... doPausedProcessing Resume 024c 0602
- CDragonCode::onPaused doPausedProcessing
- hiddenWndProc WM_PAUSED
22:56:57 LOG (Perf): DgnSAPI paused -> BeginUtt = 380 msec

Look at the time differential. Your Dragon log is populated with hundreds and hundreds of instances of this set of entries. The time differential between each can range from as little as 3 seconds to as much as 20 to 30 seconds. It's no wonder you're experiencing a latency issue.

I also see that your user profile is converted from a previous version (v11). I would suggest you try the following:

1.  First, disable everything except Dragon and then post me a new Dragon log. I suspect that these entries are from Vocola and/or Natlink/Python. Therefore, let me know if latency improves when you disable these.

2.  Try creating a new user profile, skip training, and don't add any custom vocabulary or commands. Let me know what the result is after you have tested this new user for 20 or 30 min. also, send me your Dragon log afterwards.

No amount of new hardware is going to save you from this.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower® Ultimate

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

 sorry, I didn't clear the log before I did this so it's way at the bottom. But there is a noticeable improvement in latency,which is great. However, a couple times it hung for I don't know how many seconds when I was just trying to page down in the copied log file using Notepad.

and yes, now that I think of it, when I upgraded to 11 from 10.1, I converted. and also when I switched computers about eight months ago, I imported my user profile. (although I'm not exactly sure if I'm using that profile anymore, or if I created a new one and imported the vocabulary) I'll create a new profile with no vocab and post it next.

and again, thanks for helping me figure this out.

Seems like the same performance as the previous post.

Dragon new user profile.txt  (15 KB)

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