I have the Olympus Dircectrec DR – 1200 microphone which I used to dictate into an EMR with Dragon Medical.  Since most of the data entry is point-and-click, I am only using the microphone intermittently, thus it requires a lot of toggling the microphone off and on.  The programming allows you to set microphone buttons to turn the microphone on or turn the microphone off, but I can't find a way to program a button to "go to sleep."  The problem here, is that I would like to be able to dictate a phrase, and immediately toggle the microphone off and set it down.  However, if you turn the microphone off before the phrase recognition is finished, that seems to cancel the recognition.  This is not so with putting the microphone to sleep.  If I could put the microphone to sleep with one of the microphone programmable buttons, this would then be a one-handed operation, however.  Right now I'm having to set a keyboard hotkey to put the microphone to sleep, which is less convenient.

So my question is, is there some way to program a microphone button to put the microphone to sleep? 

Thanks

Lou 

Dragon Medical v. 11.00.300.312

Fujitsu Lifebook T730 

Olympus Dr-1200 microphone 

Lou,

My first response to your question is like the doctor-patient interaction joke:

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this.

Doctor: Then don't do that.

However, there are a couple of ways that you can deal with this.

The first way is to look at the hotkeys in the Dragon Options dialog. You'll notice that Dragon uses the hotkey for the numeric keypad "/" key for toggling the microphone between on and sleep mode. If you can program a microphone button to make use of this specific numeric keypad key, then your problem is solved.

On the other hand, you might want to try out Lindsay's (PCByVoice) utility that allows you to turn the microphone on and off by voice command and which shouldn't interfere with your dictation not completing because the command to turn the microphone off, which is a standard Dragon command, won't execute until all of your previous dictation is complete, whether that be dictation or commands. Because Dragon 11-11.5, and specifically DMPE, uses multithreading and stores multiple utterances and/or commands and executes them in sequence, the solution should work very nicely for you. I use it consistently with DNS 11.5 Professional and DMPE and it never interferes with anything that is in the queue (speech buffer) as far as dictation or commands.

Basically, it depends on what method you really prefer. However, I prefer Lindsay's PCByVoice SpeechStart™ for Dragon because it works better and it doesn't leave you prone to the potential for spontaneously turning the microphone back on, which can occur in all versions of DNS 11. You can purchase that little utility for a song ($11 US) and downloaded directly from Lindsay's website PCByVoice.com. Of course you have to register before you purchase this little utility, but I think you would find that it solves your problem very nicely in a much better manner than assigning a hotkey to a microphone button.

http://www.pcbyvoice.com/shop/pcbyvoice-speechstart/

The choice is yours.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: We don't make Dragon NaturallySpeaking, We make it better!

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