Today I discovered quite by accident something that may assist users having problems with performance and/or memory (RAM) when using DNS 11.5.

If you are experiencing problems because you have 6 GB of RAM or less and are running under Windows 7 64-bit, or if your CPU is not One that supports multithreading or only has L2 cache, there is a way that you can improve performance under these conditions. It also may be helpful for those who are using Core™ i3 or Core™ i5 processors with limited L3 cache and minimum RAM (i.e., between four and 6 GB).

In DNS 11.5, when you create a new user profile, you can set your profile up using BestMatch IV, but using the Medium vocabulary rather than the Large vocabulary. Using the Medium vocabulary does not reduce the total number of words in the Active Vocabulary. However, it does reduce the memory footprint without reducing the critical and important words in the Active Vocabulary. The overall advantage is that it generally improves the performance (speech to text), responsiveness to commands and dictation, initialization when you launch Dragon with your user profile, and you can further improve performance by setting the Speed vs. Accuracy slider to 0% (Fastest Response) without sacrificing accuracy.

However, there are a couple of features and caveats:

1.  if you're using one of the Professional versions, you cannot use "Manage Vocabularies…" To back up the General-Large vocabulary, and then import that into your BestMatch IV General-Medium vocabulary because you will be back to square one with a General-Large vocabulary. In other words, Exporting and Importing your vocabulary using Manage Vocabularies… from a profile that uses the General-Large vocabulary is self-defeating. In other words, don't do it period. Use the "Export custom word and phrase list…" and "Import list of words or phrases…" While that may require a little extra work if you got a lot of properties settings, it at least maintains your General-Medium vocabulary status. Despite the extra effort, it is more than worth it.

2.  you do not have to worry about your custom commands. You can import them as you have always done.

3.  Once you have edited your General-Medium vocabulary and reset the properties for any words, you can use the Managed Vocabularies… To export your modified vocabulary (Professional versions only). This way you will always have a backup of both your General-Large and General-Medium vocabularies, which you can then use depending upon whether you are creating a user profile using the General-Large or the General-Medium vocabularies.

4.  One advantage of #3 above is that it doesn't matter whether you're using BestMatch IV or BestMatch III, you can use what ever vocabulary you choose. In other words, choosing Large or Medium is not dependent upon the Speech model.

One further possible consequence of using this approach is that it may reduce the propensity, in some cases, for producing the irritating ITNDebug problem, and/or reduce or eliminate the user profile corruption problem that some users are experiencing. There is no absolute guarantee that any of these issues will be resolved, but you will experience better performance in most cases, and you will definitely experience less problems with memory issues.

The bottom line is that it's worth the experiment. It would also be useful in any one tries this and reports there results to see if it confirms my findings.

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

"Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count." Albert Einstein

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Hi Chuck,

 

I am unable to set my selection to the medium vocabulary. Moreover, I only see best match 3. I am using DNS professional 11.5 but I have set my region as India.

 

See the attached screenshot. What am I missing?

Pranav

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Pranav,

 

it's the selection of regions and/or accents that limits your speech models and/or vocabulary. In other words, based on your selections as far as region etc. is why you don't see the options for BestMatch IV Medium vocabulary. Nuance only supports BestMatch IV and/or the Medium vocabulary under certain conditions. Yes, you are missing something but it's based on your choices.

 

Take a look at the Dragon Help and you'll see what your options are based on regional and accent settings, as well as the limits.

 

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

"Life's Rule #1: Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend."  (Variant of Murphy's Law  -  Edward A. Murphy, Jr)

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Chuck, this is a really interesting proposition! It will be fascinating to see if people anecdotally note any improvement on the Forum to your suggestion. If the anecdotal evidence borne out by responses to the forum is overwhelmingly positive, then this is an extremely practical solution reducing some of the hardware limitations.

Unfortunately when creating a UK/British English profile, one is not afforded the option to create a profile with a "medium sized vocabulary"! This true of DNS 11.5 Premium, but I suspect the same is true of the Professional Edition. It will be interesting to see when it is released what options for vocabulary management DNS 12 will proffer.

 

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DNS 12.0 Professional, Windows 7, Intel Core i7 2630QM, 16GB of RAM. Second-Generation SpeechWare 6-in-1.

Chuck, would this work with Windows XP SP3 on a Core2Duo processor limited to 4 GB?

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DNS 12.5 Pro, Win7, i7-3770K @ 3.7GHz, 16 Gb, 256 Gb SSD Boot drive, 3-in-1 TableMike - KnowBrainer 12 - Thanks so much, Lunis.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just tried, with a BestMatch IV user, importing a medium vocabulary created with a BestMatch III user. Works fine, but I can't import a list of custom words. Get the red x whenever I try.

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Do a search for two spaces somewhere in your list of words.  That happened to me and I finally found one phrase with two spaces in it that was shutting the whole thing down.

Thanks. Unfortunately, that's not it, but you've given me some ideas.

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Very cool suggestion, Chucker. I am using Dragon Professional 11.5, and I can tell that Dragon's response time is noticeably quicker using a medium vocabulary.

 

I can also happily report that relying on Dragon's medium vocabulary has not created any particular dictation problems that I can tell, though I think my personal speaking vocabulary is reasonably far-ranging.

 

For work, I need to use a Lenovo i5 laptop that is already maxed out with 3 GB of memory, running Windows XP (service pack 3). So I gather from Lunis's advice yesterday that Dragon's version 12 professional might not be a good upgrade choice for me, given the limitations of this laptop.

 

Your medium-vocabulary suggestion might be just what I need to get faster response from Dragon, without the upgrade. 

 

Thanks again for the suggestion!

 

Rich Bouma

If you need additional speed, consider creating a BestMatch III profile.

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Click KB 2012 REV D to Download a 30 Day Evaluation of KnowBrainer 2012 

 

 

 

So what is the difference between medium and large vocabularies if the active vocabulary is the same size for both?

Hi, newbie here.

Also mirroring dmehling's concern. I wasn't too clear on Chucker's caveat:
"...In other words, Exporting and Importing your vocabulary using Manage Vocabularies... from a profile that uses the General-Large vocabulary is self-defeating..."

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Core2Quad 2.4GHz; 4GB RAM; WinXP Pro; DNS 11.5 Pro; Sennheiser ME3 mic

Emilio & dmehling,

First, the Active Vocabulary (i.e., the number of words stored in the Vocabulary Editor), by default, generally contains the same number of entries regardless of whether you're using the General-Large or Medium vocabularies). I'm sure that Rüdiger could validate this by comparing the number of entries in both, but generally Dragon NaturallySpeaking maintains a consistent number of words even across different vocabularies. For example, the same applies to the medical specialty vocabularies in the medical versions of DNS, as well as in the Legal vocabulary.

Second, the Active Vocabulary is a lexicon. That is, it is simply a database that contains words and their respective pronunciations. As a database, it's not the number of entries that determines the size, it's the content. If I'm not mistaken, and it's difficult to check completely, my understanding is that the General-Large vocabulary contains word entries that simply take up more space, as well as being somewhat more complex. The Medium vocabulary replaces some of these complex words and phrases with more common words and phrases that take up less space, but are more common to every day usage. Therefore, the general footprint of the Medium vocabulary is smaller than the General-Large vocabulary. How much? Good question, but it seems to be at least 250 to 500 kB less Re: the Medium vocabulary.

Third, each vocabulary comes with its own Language Model unique to that vocabulary. It is entirely possible that the Language Model for the Medium vocabulary is also smaller in overall size than the Language Model for the General-Large, perhaps because the number and complexity of Language Model entries for the Medium vocabulary is reduced in overall size creating a smaller footprint.

Lastly to answer your basic question if you export a General-Large vocabulary using the "Manage Vocabularies..." and import it into a user profile that has a Medium vocabulary, what you end up with is a General-Large vocabulary. Being that I've never tested I'm not sure that it's even possible (i.e., that it can be done relative to compatibility issues). Nevertheless, overwriting the Medium vocabulary with a General-Large vocabulary, if possible, would result in your profile with a Medium vocabulary ending up with the General-Large vocabulary. That's what I mean by self-defeating. If you're using a Medium vocabulary and you want to maintain that vocabulary, what would be the purpose of changing it to a General-Large vocabulary via Manage Vocabularies...? In essence, what I meant was that if you use "Manage Vocabularies..." to Export/Import a General-Large vocabulary into a user profile that has a Medium vocabulary, all you're doing is basically holding a fully loaded 9 mm semi automatic pistol pointed at your big toe and pulling the trigger.

Chuck

"Life's Rule #1: Once you pull the pin, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend." (Variant of Murphy's Law - Edward A. Murphy, Jr)

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