Hi. I'm in a situation where I need to navigate SAP-ERP software efficiently by voice. I soon will have access to Dragon for this purpose, and I am wondering if the added functionality of Knowbrainer would be relevant/compatible with this particular business software.

Does anyone have experience navigating SAP-ERP software by voice?
Is there any advice, workarounds, or helpful tricks that I should be aware of?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Our understanding is that SAP-ERP is cloud-based which loosely translates as being a hostile environment to Dragon. We doubt you will be able to dictate and movement will likely be very limited. KnowBrainer 2017 and DragonCapture should be able to tame that tiger. You'll find 30 day trials in our signature tag

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So Dragon capture is a definite yes!!!

Investing in a personal copy, and I am also going to request that as an accommodation at work.

I am less certain about know-brainer.

The big thing I think KB does that might be useful, is allow for the automation of repetitive step-by-step processes,  that include clicking on an on-screen button somewhere in the middle, that doesn't have a hotkey binding.

What I don't know, is how robust that sort of automation would be to minor shifts in UI.

For example, what happens if on Monday, I have my Outlook mailbox snapped to the left half of my screen, and the SAP Windows snapped right, and on Tuesday I arrange them in reverse.

Or if my notes section in SAP is different lengths, so the scrollbars end up in slightly different places during different calls.

Would those situations lead to a bunch of misfires if I automated a process that involved clicking on an on-screen button in the middle with KB?

I'm already requesting some pretty expensive mods at work, Dragon + Zoomtext magnifier/reader + big monitor to a company that, so I'm a bit hesitant to add KB to the list unless I'm absolutely sure it's going to be a productivity game changer.

The other gremlin that's getting me, is that I've been running caster for so long on my personal machines, that I found today I literally had to look up how to do something with vanilla Dragon, that I'm used to doing in caster with some short monosyllable commands without thinking.

I know KBs command structure is more powerful than vanilla dragons, but it's not going to help me on that front, still going to have to relearn some things

KnowBrainer can do so much that it is impossible to cover here. We recommend checking out our What is KnowBrainer

We only recommend Mouse Position application-specific commands as a last resort; when there is no other choice. This is because they utilize window position (X & Y coordinates). KnowBrainer does not include built in Mouse Position commands. For example, it doesn't matter where your Outlook utility is positioned because KnowBrainer already includes full Outlook automation and even AI commands like Email <Lunis>.

Some SAP is already supported while others may require personal commands but you should be able to accomplish this without having to resort to Mouse Position commands. For example, scrolling and global up/down support is already included.

There are many ways of triggering a non-Dragon friendly button. When you're creating a personal command, look for a hotkey or see if you can combine {Tab} X amount of times with {Enter} or {Spacebar}. Mouse command should only be considered a last resort. 

ZoomText magnifier is obviously better than the Windows built-in zoom function but like pretty much everything you can imagine, the ability to zoom in/out is also included in KnowBrainer.

Dragon includes a lot of built-in commands plus the ability to create custom commands. However, Dragon's primary focus is dictation where KnowBrainer's ONLY focus is built-in commands with the ability to hands-free create personal commands in Dragon or KnowBrainer, via our patented VerbalBasic which is Trump approved (if Eric can do it so can you). Most end-users don't create more than a handful of personal commands because they find it unnecessary. 

Unlike Dragon, you can edit, rename (single syllables) and delete built-in commands but we do not recommend using single syllable names because of the risk. For example, if we wish to open our “Letterhead” template on Drive D we say Windows Open File <letterhead>. Oh yes, you can open any file, folder or application anywhere on your computer. You can also globally go to the homepage of nearly any website by saying something like Browse to <KnowBrainer> or Google for <What percentage of Tennessee is vaccinated> (YIKES!) You might be surprised at how many commands you don't have to create.

We see what you mean about learning new commands but in most situations you really won't have to. Think of KnowBrainer as using far less commands to accomplish the same task much faster. Example: Most end-users dictate a paragraph and then look for misrecognitions or editing. When you are done, your cursor is usually in the middle of the paragraph. In order to create a new paragraph you have to begin by saying move to end of paragraph (pause), new paragraph (pause) and dictate something like “my dog has fleas”. The KnowBrainer command will do all of these things in one breath, not to mention 15 times faster. We would say Paragraph <my dog has fleas>. Learning KnowBrainer is much easier than you think. Forgetting Dragon commands is a little harder but how much is your time worth? We recommend starting off with the KnowBrainer Quickstart (top 20 commands) and of course, get work to pay for KnowBrainer

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Thanks so much for the links to the abbreviated documentation

I started trying to look at the full manual one day after work this week, and it was a little much.

I just got approval to start using Dragon capture in my work environment this coming Monday.

I'm definitely coming around to the idea that full KnowBrainer is the right tool for me in that corporate software environment.

I'm going to take a deeper look at the documentation, and do some testing on my personal machine, but right now I've  got two specific questions that would be really helpful to know the answers for.

I know that KnowBrainer  adds powerful Outlook commands, are those tied to "dragons connection to Outlook"? For some reason the connection between Dragon and outlook on my work laptop is really unstable.

Secondly, I see that knowBrainer implements a really nice command set, for switching to the nth task on the taskbar. However, if there are multiple windows associated with one task, it's currently giving me a completely black thumbnail pain, instead of the thumbnails. Looking at the knowBrainer sidebar, it looks like I should be able to say 1st 2nd or 3rd window to choose the specific application instance within the task but it's not working on my test system. Is there a better/alternative way to do this?

I know it's a nitpicky detail, but I'm asking because I could see myself using this literally every 5 minutes at work.

Right now I can't quickly switch to the SAP program by voice using Dragon, and it wouldn't be uncommon to have 3 windows associated with one SAP related taskbar entry.

1. 99.9% of KnowBrainer commands run independently of Dragon (other than being hooked into the Dragon speech engine). We avoid Dragon's Active Accessibility and Select-&-Say because the commands would be too slow and too unreliable.

2. Microsoft windows and browsers are limited to 9 Taskbar tabs and 9 Windows (tabs) in browsers, KnowBrainer is limited to the same restrictions. Microsoft probably assumed that no one would need more than 9 tabs in the late 90s and simply haven't noticed the higher demand. Because we have 32 inch monitors, we have the luxury of changing our options to display multiple windows (tabs) of everything we have open; like to File Explorer folders. Of course that means we typically run 20 tabs. Having said that, the 1st 9 tab commands are designed to bring them up but not hover, which you would need to see a thumbnail view.

KnowBrainer's most important feature, that is typically ignored (because there are so many good samples), is it's ability to create personal commands. Think of the included KnowBrainer commands as just samples. If we wrote a command for every circumstance, KnowBrainer would be so top-heavy that it couldn't run. We had to remove 75% of our original commands. We recommend checking out our patented VerbalBasic II chapter in the KnowBrainer Manual where you will find command construction details and videos. We believe you will find VerbalBasic II to be, what we call, short bus Eric Trump capable (if Eric can do it so can you).

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Thanks. I'll take a look at the scripting guide. I suspect I'll be able to use taskbar.PY as a template, and build the analogous functions using know-brainers scripting language, if nothing else, it will be an interesting test to see how easy I pick up the scripting language.

I got Dragon capture up and running on my work PC today, and it definitely alleviated the worst of the pain points, but the individual training me definitely thinks we need to take the optimization further.

I'm going to make a big chart for my supervisor and the IT guy with the options going forward. I just want to check another detail, does know-brainer leverage continuous command recognition a.k.a. you don't need to pause between a series of multiple commands, or is it primarily based on doing more with each individual command, rather than being able to rapidfire them off?