Hello,

I have some health related issues that I use NaturallySpeaking for along with a serial mouse. Everything was great on Windows 7. I decided to upgrade to a new computterr and Windows 10 came with it. The serial mouse causes the computer to freeze every 2 hours. Tried 2 PCI cards, couple serial to USB. Both of these the PCI card and USB option cause Windows to crash or freeze often. I had hoped to use Linux with NaturallySpeaking but is not looking promising.

So I might  have to go back to Windows 7. Windows 10 just does not work with the mouse.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Brian

A serial (port) mouse is pretty ancient. Perhaps it is a specific (trackball) model that you can't do without? If so there should be modern alternatives like the Marble Mouse or other ergonomic models.

Unless via a Virtual Machine using Dragon in Linux is not a real option. 

Speaking of virtualization you could install Windows 7 in Windows 10 via a virtual machine like Virtual Box but replacing your mouse with something more up-to-date would probably be best.

Well I use a environmental control and it is older but it works well over or has with Windows 7. Yes there is the virtual machine route, well hopefully my friend can get it to work on Linux. Real techie

The above spam notwithstanding, I've been doing exactly the VM route for DNS for many years. Windows 7 is a better behaved guest than 10 for me.I've used vmware, virtualbox, and kvm/qemu, and the most convenient and useful for now is virtualbox, because it supports seamless windows (windows 7 apps appear on the desktop w/out win7 taking over the whole desktop). Modern CPUs have great VM support, and rebooting a VM when windows throws a fit is easy and fast.
Cheers, M

PS. my favorite Linux flavor now is Manjaro KDE. Especially great if you have a good GPU to go along with a modern CPU. I'm partial to AMD and this laptop is running the 4500u. Desktop is 3800x w/NVIDIA . RAM, lots of RAM, is good.

I have been really curious about using DPI 15 on a virtual box running windows 7.  I am curious about your setup.  Do you ahve any issues mapping the headset to the virtual machine?

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Hi. I'm not sure how your VM set up worked out, or whether this information will be helpful to you, but there are now some options for native speech recognition on Linux.


The easy one to install is here: https://talonvoice.com/

There is a very helpful slack community you should join if you're interested in Talon.

When I'm in Linux,  I use Caster with the Kaldi speech recognition engine on the backend. The installation process for that one is still under development, and it's a little convoluted, but here's a link for you to take a look at.

https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/Caster/issues/849

Caster suits my workflow better, but I was already used to the commands for running it alongside Dragon in Windows, and I know the Talon developer made some major improvements to the speech recognition backend for Talon a couple of months after I did my side-by-side testing, so I'm not sure which one might be better for you at the moment.

Depending on your hardware, I would recommend the Cinnamon or or Xfce Edition of Linux Mint. Cinnamon is more Win7-like, while Xfce uses system resources a bit more efficiently, which can be helpful because speech recognition is resource intensive.

Additionally, if you go the caster route, it's easier to create a custom desktop icon to launch it in Xfce. Talon automates the icon creation, so it doesn't matter with Talon.

Lastly, you might find value in running your microphone through noisetorch

it's a free Linux based noise cancellation utility that does wonders for my speech recognition accuracy on Linux, and might even be relevant for the VM approach with Windows 7 and Dragon, depending on how everything is configured. I've never tried to run Dragon inside a VM in Linux though, so I'm not sure about that last point.

Sorry for writing a novel, but I really hope some of this information is helpful to you.