I'm working with Dragon 13 Premium on a computer with an Intel i7-4770S 3.1 GHz processor and 8 GB RAM on a Windows 7 Enterprise system. Microphone is a wireless headset Andrea NC-181VM USB. As I first start dictate into Word 2010 documents the lag time between my speaking and the transcription of my words is acceptably quick but with each additional phrase the lag time gets progressively longer and longer until it approaches minutes instead of seconds.

I have plenty of computing horsepower so that's not the issue. The Andrea headset microphone has an external soundcard and is reported to produce reasonably good speech recognition results so I don't think that's the issue. The microphone is positioned properly and facing the correct direction.

Any thoughts on where I might next look to troubleshoot this issue?

-------------------------

HOME: Gateway DX4831, Intel Core i5-650, 3.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional, Dragon Professional Individual 15, KnowBrainer 2012, Firefox 47, Microsoft Office 2013, Speechware 3-in-1 Table Mike WORK: Hewlett-Packard HP Compaq dc7700p Convertible, Intel Core 2 CPU 6600 @ 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional, Dragon Professional 12, Jabra GN9350, Realtek HD Audio soundcard

How long are your Word documents (in pages)? Do they contain tables or images?

The Andrea Electronics NC-181 VM is not wireless. While the included USB soundcard is excellent, the NC-181 microphone portion of your microphone is on the bottom of our recommendation list BUT any microphone on our website meets our requirements and considered adequate or better so your current microphone isn't the problem.

Alan brought up an excellent point about the size of your documents. You should be OK working with documents up to as many as 50 pages but may have better luck with 30 pages or even less. You might also want to verify whether or not this problem only occurs in Microsoft Word.

-------------------------

Forum Mission Statement
Trial Downloads
Dragon/Sales@KnowBrainer.com 
(615) 884-4558 ext 1

Sorry, I misspoke about the wireless headset. I'm well aware that it is a wired microphone. That was just a "brain fart". Anyway, this problem occurs with a brand-new blank Word document. I can look into whether this issue only occurs in Microsoft Word but I believe it was occurring with dictation into other programs as well.


-------------------------

HOME: Gateway DX4831, Intel Core i5-650, 3.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional, Dragon Professional Individual 15, KnowBrainer 2012, Firefox 47, Microsoft Office 2013, Speechware 3-in-1 Table Mike WORK: Hewlett-Packard HP Compaq dc7700p Convertible, Intel Core 2 CPU 6600 @ 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional, Dragon Professional 12, Jabra GN9350, Realtek HD Audio soundcard

Did you remember to change your Dragon Data/Options in Save recorded dictation with document from ALWAYS to NEVER? See if you can replicate this problem in DragonPad. If you can, try creating a new user profile and if that doesn't work, the problem is more likely computer related.

-------------------------

Forum Mission Statement
Trial Downloads
Dragon/Sales@KnowBrainer.com 
(615) 884-4558 ext 1

Finally had a chance to do some more troubleshooting. For starters, this is Dragon 13 Premium so the "save recorded dictation with document" option is not available. That only comes with Professional.

The lag time issue was replicated in DragonPad. Next tried creating a new user profile and that did seem to make a major improvementat first. However, after continued usage the same lag issue returned.

There is one additional observation to share. It seemed like Dragon was actually doing a fairly good job and relatively quickly transcribing dictation but it would hang up and not transcribe the last utterance. Then as soon as it received several more phrases it would transcribe them fairly quickly but then hang up and essentially never transcribe the last phrase. Also, the "go to sleep" command would not be recognized but instead transcribed this text.

So I am stumped. This Dragon is installed in an office setting on a network which has other Dragon users but as far as I know they are not experiencing anything like this kind of issue.

I guess one last step would be to try uninstalling and reinstalling the program.

Any other thoughts?

-------------------------

HOME: Gateway DX4831, Intel Core i5-650, 3.2 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional, Dragon Professional Individual 15, KnowBrainer 2012, Firefox 47, Microsoft Office 2013, Speechware 3-in-1 Table Mike WORK: Hewlett-Packard HP Compaq dc7700p Convertible, Intel Core 2 CPU 6600 @ 2.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional, Dragon Professional 12, Jabra GN9350, Realtek HD Audio soundcard

While uninstalling and reinstalling Dragon is a popular end-user decision, it is almost always the wrong decision and should only be considered as a last resort. The fact that Dragon works most likely means that it doesn't need to be reinstalled and you couldn't pick a worse time to uninstall/reinstall because the Dragon servers are down and we do not know when they will be back up. Nuance was ransacked by the latest ransom virus and they got their proverbial butts handed to them for not maintaining proper updates and habits.

Are you storing your Premium 13 user profile on the network or locally? Have you tried setting your Disk space reserved for playback to 0 and additionally adding a checkmark to Conserve disk space required by user profile (for portability), in your Dragon Data/Options? Do you have ample hard drive space left over on your operating system drive? Your computer actually acts like it's running out of RAM and having to dip into virtual memory. Of course it's difficult to ascertain but you might even have a damaged stick of RAM which could drastically limit your computer's memory. You might not notice on any other application but Dragon is a resource hog that will find almost anything that is wrong with your computer. You could pseudo-test this theory by temporarily only working with DragonPad.

-------------------------

Forum Mission Statement
Trial Downloads
Dragon/Sales@KnowBrainer.com 
(615) 884-4558 ext 1

Hey Lunis, my posts on this thread somehow got deleted... trying to understand what happened. If you want, you may reply to me, privately. Thanks

-------------------------

Win 10 | DPI 15 | 32GB Ram - i7-6700 | Sennheiser MB Pro 1 UC | Hands-free stenomask - Talktech | VC2017_v2-02 | KB2017

Namegoeshere,

The KnowBrainer server crashed and had to be replaced. The result was that some posts between July 1 and July 7 were lost and Lunis indicated in his post at that time that he was not sure that they could be recovered. That may be the reason your posts were lost. They may not be recoverable.

Chuck

"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see." -- Mark Twain

-------------------------

VoiceComputer: the only global speech interface.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not reflect those of VoiceTeach LLC.

Chuck Runquist
VoiceComputer technical support

Oh ok did not see that. Thanks

-------------------------

Win 10 | DPI 15 | 32GB Ram - i7-6700 | Sennheiser MB Pro 1 UC | Hands-free stenomask - Talktech | VC2017_v2-02 | KB2017

I'm running into a very similar problem, and the agents in New Zealand who maintain my system for me are stumped as well and they cannot get any helpful advice out of Nuance. The problem is similar in that there are delays but these occur after a period of time of normal operation. So I can be jumping from word to Excel to Outlook or creating a file in Windows Explorer and dictating in the filename. Then all of a sudden what I say delays for about 20 seconds. It becomes particularly frustrating if I'm doing a correction when being after dictating the correction in there is a delay and then a further 20 seconds of delay to save it before I can get out of it. Also randomly it will say the plug-in for Dragon is not installed in Excel or Word.

I was advised to do all of the following over a period of time. Replace my microphone, I did this with several microphones both into the USB through the Know Brainer USB adapter. Tried the microphone into the soundcard. A high-quality radio microphone into the soundcard.
I knew these were useless because a microphone fault would be there all the time.

I was told I had insufficient RAM and showed them that I was only using half the quantity of RAM by the task manager graphing in the process was nowhere near overloaded. The processor is an AMD ID10 - 5800K with a solid-state drive.

I was told I had too much on my desktop so I cleared everything off and put it in another drive. (This particular gem from Nuance)

I did have a drive that was giving me some grief, a USB drive and we replaced this.

We tried turning off my twin monitor and HDMI monitor mirror and only running with a single monitor to no better results. (My idea)

There have been numerous exclusions put in for the Avast malware program to ensure that Dragon is not being held up by this.

Right now it's operating absolutely perfectly probably because it knows Lunis could be looking at it and ready to give it a spanking.

I have followed all the advice above, but this advice has already been done by the company that maintains the software for us. When from time to time about once a year Dragon stuffs up really badly, they reinstall the whole lot for me on-the-fly and I'm back and running in about half an hour.

With the present debacle I have had a reinstall again with no good results.

This is giving me so much grief that it severely affecting my business life. I never know when I'm in the midst of something important and significant and the creative juices flowing, then the whole lot stuffs up and sometimes even a full reboot leads it to stuffing up again shortly after.

I was trying dictation and the DragonPad to see if it was any different, and Dragon crashed the whole lot came to a halt and it had not saved anything on DragonPad.

-------------------------
AnthonyL

Lunis sorry not Linus!

-------------------------
AnthonyL

Dragon professional version 15 000 00 076

-------------------------
AnthonyL

Hello Anthony,


Considering your problems and following your saga let me suggest this to you:


A computer is an electrical system and electrical systems need certain parameters in order to operate. I never know whether to just issue a list of things to do and try or whether to go to the trouble of explaining the reasoning.


A computer system consists, in the main, with hardware, device drivers and programs. When one has a problem that appears to be outside the norm people like me have a generalised checklist. One would start at a point and work one's way through it. Bear in mind that when dealing with computers almost any problem has an answer that equals what the length of a piece of string is. There are however general steps one may take.


Electrical current needs connectivity. The low style of current basically within a computer system means that the electrical contacts must be virtually resistant free and mechanically sound. So let's start with the audio chain.

?

Audio chain problems can be intermittent and in fact often are. So one would want to make certain that there was no intermittent signal in the audio chain no matter what the cause. Most the time the interference is concerning electrical conductivity. This is not always the case but I always assume this is where I start.


Use a headset with its own USB sound pod (card) in the actual line ending in a USB cable. Make certain that the USB plug is firmly in place on the back of your computer box. Not on the front and not connected through some type of USB external hub. If it is already connected into a port on the back of the box try a different port. Now test the rig and play back the sound and listen for crystal-clear representation of your voice.

?

One should take the trouble to make certain that your computer USB devices and connections at no time fall asleep under your power saving plan

 

– one would hope that you know how to do this and set it up but if you don't I'm pretty certain that is a good section in the quick tips on how to stop your computer power saving plan switching off your USB ports – if your USB ports get switched off after a period of time there are problems. Don't forget I'm giving a generalised checklist.


Okay one is reasonably certain we have sound – personally I would not ever use a built-in soundcard for speech recognition – can it be done? Well yes by the top geeks and audio fanatics I suppose but for most of us are headset with a USB sound pod connected to the rear USB ports on the computer box, with a microphone set up properly in the right position, works like a charm.


Now let's assume that your installation of Dragon and Microsoft Office are sound, up-to-date and uncorrupted. You seem to indicate that they are.


The next step is what one could call general housekeeping. Cleaning up all the junk files, checking the discs for errors, making certain the discs are defragmented (non-SSD drives) – run health test on your drives, having the operating system totally up-to-date. Okay let's assume that is all in order.


Personally I would junk your virus/malware solution. I run Windows defender in Windows 10 with the freeware version of Malwarebytes (definitely not running in the background) which I run to scan my files and memory every week or so.


I think you have to face the fact that something is slowing down and chewing up your processing power. If every bit of information is just the difference between a switch being turned on and off electrically and all those little on off switch states are streaming down the electrical connections when it comes the CPU, basically, one event at a time is allowed to pass through the gate (okay guys I know this is an oversimplification but the fact is there is a bottleneck which has to be sorted out and if that bottleneck gets congested and jammed you end up getting a slowdown)


What does this imply? Only have the services, processes and programs running that you actually need to achieve the project actually on hand at that time. There are many excellent ways of shutting down processes and services that are not actually needed at any given time. For instance, sometimes when doing video editing I don't like waiting for complicated renders of my video edits so my particular program will run with virtually every other program and service and process, including explorer on the desktop totally switched off and not running :-). My system boots completely in 24 seconds. It's faster for me to set up my system for a particular job and then reboot to go onto the next job should I want to.


You don't have to be a fanatic but you should realise when you're swapping between open word, open Excel and open Outlook documents you might be asking for trouble. Personally I don't have any trouble and I keep all my DRA files so I can edit later – most people don't and they're all sorts of settings that you can do to try to stop Dragon chewing up memory space – don't forget the program runs entirely in RAM basically. My approach is not to interfere with that but to severely limit the amount of RAM being used by the rest of the system. I simply find this approach easier but it may not be everybody's cup of tea.


The point is that when you change focus between open Windows in any program like word, Outlook or Excel Dragon has to do far more than just realise that there is a new mouse position. There is a pile of stuff it has to do in the background. Personally I think that this is where most the lag is coming from because the way in which the memories being used tends to slow it down. It's no good looking at CPU usage to get a handle on this – it doesn't really matter what the report say what matters is what is actually happening. Dragon is very good at not losing the audio that is to be turned into text and it seems to be able to back it up as it were so if there's any delays at all it will be in which the time taken between speaking the phrase and the phrase appearing as text on the screen. That's a very wonderful thing, I mean if you type on your keyboard to quickly the keyboard buffer is more than capable of completely losing some of those keystrokes so one ought to be very grateful that the message is getting through even if it is delayed.


Personally I use a specialised Windows clipboard manager to hold reams of data so for me, sometimes, is quicker to completely shut down a window or a program and open another one and paste across from a drop down menu out of my clipboard manager. To me one of the best ways to handle dictation is to do it in Jarte which is as close to WordPad but with the added benefit of auto saving and remembering all my settings.


After all you say that DragonPad itself collapses that should tell you that there really is a problem – Windows 10 looks after its system pretty well in fact my Windows 10 system is corrupted but it still working if the same thing had been happening on my Windows 7 system I would have had to do a complete barebones reinstallation Windows 7 to keep going. I'm sort of hanging out to buy myself a new rig one of these days :-).


Let's say that you know that your system starts to slow down after 45 minutes with the continual use – if you had a system that rebooted in 45 seconds you could be back again at the work face within a minute and to lose a minute every 45 minutes is not such a big deal – anyway on my system that would be the case.


If you want to keep multiple Microsoft Office programs open with multiple tabs in those programs open so that you can cut-and-paste across them at will backwards and forwards willy-nilly you might always have a potential for a slowdown – I don't know because I haven't had a good look at your system but if I was intending to have an operating environment like that I would make sure that there was not a single program, background service or process running the didn't need to be

. I would not allow any program to phone home for any reason and if I didn't need to be online to do the work I would properly switch off my network card I would make sure that only the programs processes and background stuff that I actually needed to do the actual job in hand was actually active in memory and functioning in the background. The entire process of my CPU would be concentrated on the job in hand. You'd be surprised that the amount of activity that is running along under the hood all the time.


There are tons of tools and utilities that help you achieve an optimum running system and most of these sorts of things of achieved by trial and effort.


Cheers for now

Dan

-------------------------

The forum has me as a Top-Tier Member NO I am a laid-back layman

Dan,

A lot of good information, but you might want to proofread a little better. Not a criticism, just an observation: missing punctuation, run-on sentences, minor misrecognitions, incorrect verb tenses, etc. I'm just a stickler, even though I make mistakes from time to time that I miss. So, I'm not one to talk. This is just an observation because there is a lot of good information here, but it was hard to read because of such.

First, 8 GB of RAM is sufficient in most cases, but opening and closing applications, particularly Microsoft Office apps, can eat up RAM very quickly. If a user needs to constantly open and close or keep open Microsoft Office applications, be aware of the fact that some of these leak memory. That is, particularly with Microsoft Word, closing word documents does not always return RAM to Windows.

Second, the error message that the Dragon add-in has not been loaded occurs most frequently in DPI 15 because the application is loading before the add-in can be activated. Users should always check the Options | Add-ins to make sure that the NatSpeak Word AddIn, NatSpeak Excel AddIn and NatSpeak Outlook add-in are loaded and active. I see this happening on my systems from time to time, but the check always shows that the add-in is loaded and active (Active Application Add-ins).

Third, be careful recommending utilities for system maintenance and cleanup. For example, CCleaner is an excellent utility for cleaning up your system. However, users have to understand how it works and how to set it up because it can be very aggressive to the extent of creating some major hassles. If the user doesn't thoroughly understand how these utilities work and how to set them up properly, it can be an exercise in disaster.

Fourth, every time you open the document or even an application, these are stored on an ongoing basis in the Windows system registry. They are not automatically cleaned up just because you close the document or the application and they continue to collect. Constantly opening and closing some applications and documents can result in them very long list of registry entries that are not cleaned out automatically. This can sometimes result in the slowdowns noted. If a user needs to keep a lot of applications open, I recommend 16 GB of RAM, which handles this kind of situation much better than 8 GB of RAM.

Lastly, one thing that has not been considered is the issues surrounding Data Collection. This feature of Dragon only services and benefits Nuance. There is absolutely no benefit to the user to enable Data Collection. Data Collection should be completely disabled. If it is not, it will cause your system to slow down dramatically in a very short period of time because Data Collection is resource intensive. This is not to say that Anthony his system set up with Data Collection enabled, but I've seen the effect on system performance, particularly with regard to Dragon, when this option is enabled. Just something to take a look at.

Chuck

"Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see." -- Mark Twain

-------------------------

VoiceComputer: the only global speech interface.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not reflect those of VoiceTeach LLC.

Chuck Runquist
VoiceComputer technical support

Anthony,

Are you experiencing this sluggish behavior, after a few minutes, in a Dragon friendly application or non-friendly application? The reason why we ask is because we are using DPG 15 which supposedly fixes the Jumping Cursor problem in Outlook 2016 but made ours worse than DPI 15 and we were forced to disable the Dragon add-in. Unfortunately, disabling the Dragon add-in had an unfortunate side effect. Our accuracy is good enough that we are not overly concerned with dictating into non-Dragon friendly applications and we now have KnowBrainer commands that allow us to select and correct text but after an Outlook message or 2, Dragon dictation slows down to molasses speed. Our computer is an i7 6700K 4.0 Gigahertz quad core with 64 Gb of RAM. In our case, we will probably have to remove the add-in because Outlook automatically adds it back in. We additionally removed the Dragon add-in from Microsoft Excel because it hangs and can cause Dragon to crash. In our opinion, the Dragon Excel add-in is almost useless. Select-&-Say only works as long as your cursor remains in the current cell which, in our opinion, costs far more than it's worth.

We recommend putting a check mark in the Dragon Data/Options Conserve diskspace required by user profile, changing Disk space reserved for playback to 0 and changing Save recorded dictation with document to NEVER

If, after making these changes, you are still experiencing the slowdown in Dragon friendly applications; typically noted by the green dot in the DragonBar, we can only imagine a hardware issue.

-------------------------

Forum Mission Statement
Trial Downloads
Dragon/Sales@KnowBrainer.com 
(615) 884-4558 ext 1

Hello Chuck, Lunis and Dan,

Thank you for your comments and guidance.

This morning the fault was there from the very word go, and I have had to reboot the computer to start on replying to you. Sometimes the computer will run for an hour or so, switching most usually between Outlook, Windows Explorer and Excel. Then like today, the fault appears from the word go.

Microphones. I have 3 microphones, and these are all high-quality ones. Currently I'm using the Sennheiser ME3 into the Buddy USB 7G sound pod I got from Lunis. This has also had the 2 other other microphones tried into it. These are a dynamic and and AKG radio mike. (The Sampson radio mike I got from Lunis unfortunately developed an intermittent fault).

I have also used all the microphones directly into the soundcard. With similar results, as the fault is variable and one plugs in another microphone and it looks like it is all working and then suddenly the problem arises again.

I am running 16 gigs of RAM.

I have had the drives tested with a Linux utility which does a deep examination looking for errors. However we will do these again.

I have attended to all of the recommendations that Lunis made regarding disc space and not saving dictation.

Avast has had the exceptions put in for the following.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Nuance\*
C:\ProgramData\Nuance\*
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Nuance\*

Should there also be exceptions for anything else?

Is Windows defender adequate for protection (we are behind a good active Linux firewall) and is this the best to be compatible with Dragon?

I do have Malwarebytes but only bring it up for occasional examinations.

I have disabled the other programs running in the background, which is autohotkey, Mailwasher, and the Spartan clipboard. These have made no difference. I've also disabled the multiple monitors using only one. As I write this I've been ducking and diving out and in of this, checking the information I'm putting here. Everything is running perfectly with absolutely no delays.

In terms of applications running in the background, there are 59 of these but nearly all of them of them are running at 0 percent CPU and a minor impact on memory. And I certainly don't have the knowledge or information to disable for instance "systems interrupts" which I can see taking around about 1 percent of the CPU. Windows desktop manager seems to take around about 1.5 percent when I'm talking.

I have been diverted into Excel having been asked to find a document and printing it out, and come back directly in here and everything is going fine.

I think the microphone issue is a red herring, I have a background in electronics and the microphone stopping for 20 seconds and then starting again strikes me as particularly unlikely especially as I have tried 3 microphones and 2 inputs with all similar results.

So I will proceed with people hardware examinations, and await your advice on using the antivirus either Windows Defender or Avast.

Thanks.
















-------------------------
AnthonyL

We run Malwarebytes continuously and have experienced no problems. We haven't heard of any Avast antivirus issues. Windows 10 Defender is not the best but still very decent.

Can you tell us if you are experiencing the sluggish behavior in Dragon friendly applications, unfriendly applications or both?

-------------------------

Forum Mission Statement
Trial Downloads
Dragon/Sales@KnowBrainer.com 
(615) 884-4558 ext 1

Hello Lunis,

Thank you for the advice on the Malwarebytes and antivirus.
The sluggish behaviour will happen anywhere any time, in Dragon friendly and Dragon unfriendly applications.
I use the following programs with Dragon.

Chrome,
Word,
Excel,
Outlook,
Irfan View,
Windows Explorer,
Spartan Clip File,
Google Earth Map.


Mailwasher runs continuously, and this program looks at incoming mail in text form so there is no possibility of any malware getting through, and I can delete all the rubbish after a quick examination. But I don't dictate into this.

Auto Hot Key runs continuously and I use it to remap the F12 key to the 0 key on the keypad for press to talk. It's other function is to provide quick shortcuts to write standard phrases such as my name, my address and so on.


-------------------------
AnthonyL

Hi Anthony,

Thanks for your mention of my reply. In the hope that you can muddle your way through my sloppy editing, inadequate grammar and spotty punctuation let me, please, expand a few of my thoughts.

Buddy USB 7G sound pod

– while this might have been the bees knees amongst the pundits sometime back, I do believe that it is fallen out of favour these days

. I used to use a 5G back in the day before it collapsed. The 7G is known for its overheating. As I mentioned, previously, electrical conductivity is crucial and heat can have a degrading effect on the outcome. If you notice that this unit gets hot to touch it might be the root cause of your hassles.


Actually, the sound pod in my USB headset often becomes quite warm, very handy on the super cold days, the circuitry, however, appears to be capable of handling the heat without hassles. The 7G does appear, in some units, to break down under a heat stress.


There is absolutely nothing wrong with Windows defender. If one behaves in an immoderate manner opening up email attachments that come from unknown sources, turning your firewall off and surfing in well-known dangerous waters without using some sort of sandbox then the only way to get even a perception of protection is to have so much safety software running that your system ends up performing as if stuck in treacle.

?

When it comes to getting a Windows operating system running faster and smoother it really is a wonderful playground. As for myself, I like to control the processes even to the point of their running priority and whether they get parked when not needed. The list of tweaks is deliciously endless and, since Windows 10, a registry hacker's dream.


I suppose one could say there is a system of quick fixes, deeper fixes and extreme fixes. If I was confronted with your particular problem, having paid attention to my own advice and still encounter the problem of latency, I would totally uninstall Dragon. I would do a cold boot and I would run my current system as hard as I could to see if anything fell over. Open and close a few Microsoft programs with different windows open swapping focus and text insertion points back and forth a bit to see if I get a slowdown.


If I found that I did get a slowdown, will then, I would need to sort that out but, let's presume that I did not have any hassles, in this case I know that there is an interaction between my system running and Dragon. Install Dragon again, set up the profile and do a cold boot. Now I would not open a web browser, or any Microsoft program. What I would do is give Dragon a good workout in DragonPad. I would open it up and I would speak a couple of paragraphs at my normal usual style and then I would move into hyper gear and let the words pour out like a torrent including my punctuation and setting commands. I would seek to develop a lag between my voice output in the text on the page. Personally I think that Dragon can handle about 240 words per minute which is certainly faster than I can type. Beyond that I might get a bit of a lag.

?

The point is one should find out what one's operating system and Dragon can happily achieve so that one can have some type of expectation concerning any outcomes.


Once at this stage I would then increase, gradually, the complexity of the working environment. I have no problem using trial and error in an attempt to nail down a solution. If I can't train my dragon I have no hesitation at all in tricking it.


Although I have a reasonable internal soundcard, I always use Sound Blaster Extreme, I never use it for dictation. I have more variety in my audio chain than any other component on my system. I use very neat desktop shortcuts and/or taskbar programs to allow me to mix and match all my audio devices depending on whether I want privacy or entertain the street with my music of choice and everything in between. Personally I don't try to get one audio device to satisfy everything that I might want to do. That said, I most certainly have more than one audio device to input sound into Dragon. It does not take a lot of money to do this. Why there is even one disable lad that I know of who controls his system with a cheap lapel mic. In Dragon 15 it's easy to add audio input devices. Admittedly, it's not quite so easy to remove them out of the Dragon set up but certainly Rüdiger and others have a way to clean up the Dragon input device window.


If one's sound pod is on the fritz and one only has one sound pod then testing whether the sound pod is causing problems is somewhat problematic. The latest versions of Dragon don't like sound input from a line-in source and you would have to jump through hoops make such a rig work. Perhaps one ought to stay with KISS

– keep it simple stupid which I have to constantly remind myself about :-)

.


All the best with your endeavours, a simple suggestion could be to try another sound pod.


Cheers for now

Dan

 

-------------------------

The forum has me as a Top-Tier Member NO I am a laid-back layman