Hi - I just did a fresh reinstall of Dragon Professional Individual, on a PC with 32Gb of ram.  I have been using Dragon products since mid 90s,  and to vent a little, still shocked at the incredibly low quality of the software engineering.  

The dictation and performance was fine for the first session.  I let it do optimization at the end, and then using it again today,  it is making the entire machine completely unresponsive.  Mouse,  window changes,  anything interacting with desktop is like molasses.  It's 100% dragon - if I quite it, the machine is snappy again.   Right now, with dragon microphone off, it has one core completely tied up making system calls (the red below).  God know what it's doing but whatever it is is crippling the machine to the point where I'm typing up a big report rather than trying to dictate.  Has anyone seen this pattern before or even better have a fix?  I have had similar past experiences and I can't recall any particular fix.  It's why I mostly don't use it any more to be honest.  Looking at the logs, there aren't any new lines appearing.

Thoughts appreciated,

Darren

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Just because Nuance promotes optimizing, doesn't mean you should. We not only recommend against this procedure, we additionally recommend against saving dra files for optimizing. You might consider the KnowBrainer Dragon Installation/Training Guide, which includes pictorial details on the installation process, a list of Dragon commands organized by category and pictorial details on fixing those 30 sandtraps. Removing the checkmark from Run Accuracy Tuning is 1 of those 30 sandtraps.

 

We are not certain how a corrupted user profile would dramatically affect your computer speed but you might consider making a new user profile for now

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I recall you mentioning this when we had our installation cleanup session, but I do not recall you mentioning specific reasons why you recommend against optimizing Dragon. On the contrary, Nuance wants people to optimize, and they go to a lot of trouble to encourage people to do so. So, what are your reasons for recommending against optimization?

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Art Silen

'Question assumptions… Ask better questions… Think stochastically'

DSN 15 .3, running on Win10 Intel Core i7 – 8700 K CPU@3.70 GHz, with 16 GB of RAM and KnowBrainer 2017

Taking Nuance Dragon advice is equivalent to letting Eric Trump run your company. Oh wait…

 

We believe some Nuance advice is designed to prevent you from reaching out to them for $upport. For example, you may have noticed that we changed the DragonBar Options/Data Accuracy Slider from Fastest Response to Most Accurate. You might be wondering why Nuance didn't simply go with Most Accurate. When using a proper USB Microphone you can increase your accuracy by selecting Most Accurate. Additionally, when using a proper microphone, there won't be any speed difference but when using a less than optimal over-the-counter microphone your dictation could take 3 to 5 seconds to hit the page. This is because Dragon is struggling to understand what you said. When you use an inferior microphone in the Fastest Response setting, your words will drop on the page quickly but your dictation won't be as accurate. Dragon is simply making its best guess.

 

Increasing your accuracy is only 1 of those 30 recommendations. In our opinion, some Nuance recommendations are designed to help them; not you. Other Nuance recommendations are given in good faith. Nuance tries to help you (when it doesn't cut into their profit$) but keep in mind that few if any Nuance officers use Dragon more than occasionally. For this reason, Nuance speech recognition advice can be as qualified as taking cuisine advice from Donald Trump or cycling advice from President Biden

 

Getting back to your question…leaving the default checkmark in Dragon's Options/Data Run Accuracy Tuning at the time scheduled yada yada... While we found optimizing a user profile can help with accuracy (in a few situations), most of the time we found this feature will gradually deteriorate your profile. You probably won't notice it at 1st but if you regularly optimize, you may notice your user profile gradually becoming less accurate and taking longer to drop your dictation. To quote Nancy Reagan, “just say no to Dragon” or was that drugs

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I recently worked with a Dragon user who experienced similar behaviour. After observing my client, I theorized that Dragon's dragginess stemmed from the habit of leaving the microphone on when not actively using Dragon. While the microphone was active, my client talked to me, answered a phone call, coughed, etc. etc. all the while the results box flashed random words, command names, as well as the "Please say that again" message.

If you don't consistently turn off the microphone immediately when you're not dictating, maybe try that and see if the problem diminishes.

Thanks for the suggestions so far - not doing accuracy training is counter intuitive (sad even) but I have observed that accuracy tends to get worse over time, so I believe you on that one.   I have only used the profile for two days now, so I guess it's a good a time as any to toss it.   Regarding microphone off,  it's totally off.   When it's just sleeping, I would expect some CPU there to listen for the wakeup request, but this is red / totally off.  There aren't any new log entries,  it should be doing nothing.   What's particuarly insidious about this is that it's not just blowing CPU time, but it's red (system calls) so it's really tying up the operating system and that seems to make everything laggy (there's a half to 1 second delay even typing this in manually).  If I exit dragon, the machine is fine.

Apparently the original CPU pic was too big, so here is a smaller one - this is hours later and still same background system call time.

If you want to see what OS calls are being made, consider downloading and learning to use the SysInternals ProcMon app. It tracks zillions of OS API calls, searches for DLLs, and everything under the sun. This will sound WAY too simple, but you boot the app, choose the process (natspeak.dll) that you want to monitor, *define filters to select only the calls/lines/categories that you want to inspect*, run natspeak for a few minutes to trigger the problem, stop natspeak, and then examine the traces in procmon.

Defining the right filters is very important to avoid getting overwhelmed with 10 million traces of irrelevant things. There are many Youtube videos on how to work the app. When you're ready, try running Dragon until the problem slowdown occurs. Turn on tracing for a minute or two. Turn off tracing. Stop Dragon. Inspect the trace to see what Dragon is trying to do. My guess is that Dragon is looping on some call or polling something, or trying to load a DLL or something, trying to get a desired result. Sometimes the trace makes it immediately obvious what the problem is. And sometimes not so helpful. Adjusting the filters to first watch for files, then watch for other categories, can be helpful. It takes a while (a day?) to get the hang of procmon, but it's easy to use after the learning curve has been climbed. Good luck!

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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.

Six replies, and already this thread is bogged down in marginal discussions.

kkwj's advice to try ProcMon is basically sound. However, you want to look for natspeak.EXE, not natspeak.dll.

However, before you use ProcMon, first see the Task Manager - Details, sort by the CPU column, and look whether it is really natspeak.exe hogging all the CPU usage. From the screenshot it seems that one CPU kernel is running at full speed, but we don't know yet what causes this.

HTH, Stephan

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Hi there. I am relieved to read Daz1000's story and find that there is somebody else in the universe who is being tormented this way by Dragon. I can add a bit more of its behaviour to the story.

My modern laptop, running Windows 11, is also bogged down when Dragon is up, whether the microphone is on, off or asleep. Above, Lunis suggested a new profile without optimisation. Just now I closed my usual profile (but the CPU remained busy) and created a brand-new profile (during which the response time was between four and 10 seconds). Skipping the tutorial and optimisation, I am dictating now with the new profile. Accuracy is as good as ever, but the response time is as slow as the previous...

(Now manually typing.) As I waited for Dragon to finish the paragraph, Dragon crashed, saying "having trouble with a third-party app. Please restart". (Now using previous profile.) Since I have gotten in the habit of shutting down everything that might be competing with Dragon for the soundcard, it is not clear what that third-party app is. (Could it be a Dragon add-on? How do I disable Dragon add-ons ?)

It would be great if somebody could solve this problem for us. I am dependent on Dragon to write most of my text, but it has become a punishing ritual of shutting it down, then restarting it later, when even the restart bogs down.

If you wish to experiment, you can temporarily disable your browser and Microsoft Office extensions. Simply closing, SpeechStart+, DragonCapture and KnowBrainer 2022 will suffice but we doubt you will notice any difference. We have already been there and done that. We couldn't do anything quickly in Windows 11 unless we closed Dragon. We originally thought that because Dragon isn't specifically tuned for Windows 11, that it the problem. In reality, you shouldn't notice the difference.

When we upgraded Windows 10 to Windows 11, we were stuck in the same situation as you are now. We had to temporarily switch to Microsoft's Voice Access until we paid 3 different computer techs. The last tech did something seemingly very odd. He created a Windows Administrator user and ran Dragon with no problems. He then switched back to our user profile and Dragon continued running efficiently. This certainly sounds like a stupid answer but Dragon has been running well for the last 6 months or so. It can't hurt to try out this ridiculous solution

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Regarding third party apps, I never saw the error message on my machine. But for some reason on my machine, SpeechStart+ would create HUGE log files (30MB, 75MB, ..). That slowed everything down a lot. Deleting the log file helped to speed things up again. If you are using SS+, I would try to disable it. Other than that, I refer you to my post above - procmon is the tool that you will need to analyze what is going on.

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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.

@Lunis, ridiculous or not, your suggestion worked a charm. Following your scenario, I logged on as windows administrator, opened Dragon, created a user and yes, dictated for a snappy response. Background CPU usage when microphone-off had dropped from 18% before, to 4% now. Changed back to my normal login to find that here as well, Dragon's CPU usage had dropped to 4% on microphone-off. Dictation has become snappy again, and the mysterious background usage has remained around 4%. So far, so good!

Nope.  Eight hours or so later, the mic-off CPU useage has crept back to 10% +/- 3%. 

I know the situation sounds weird, but I think it could become a bit more comprehensible if you consider Dragon's long history, reaching back to a time where everyone was administrator all the time.

 

My guess is that Dragon is looking for a file/directory or registry entry and tries to create it if it cannot be found (some kind of lazy initialization).

 

As a regular user, creation of this file/folder/registry entry will fail and throw some AccessDenied exception (handling those exceptions is rather expensive, so you should not throw them when they occur very often in a short time frame).

I guess this could be the reason for the increased CPU load you saw.

 

Running Dragon as Admin, the same check for the file/folder/registry entry will also fail, but now the user running Dragon has got the neccessary permissions in place to create the element in question.

And since this element is here to stay, the problem is fixed for the regular user as well.

 

Sounds pretty conclusive to me at least

 

Cheers

mav

 

Hello Daz1000 and RogerC!

Like RogerC, I was wondering if I was the only person running into this! I've been a fervent user of DNS since 1997 (version 2.0 I think?!) and this has been driving me crazy in the past few weeks on my brand-new Windows 11 machine. Everything you described, even without a profile loaded with microphone off, single core using natspeak.exe pegged at 100%, and even worse, massive overall system sluggishness (experimented with things like alt-tab taking 2-3 seconds just to show up instead of instant, etc.).

Funny enough, yesterday I made plans to buy Windows 10 and reinstall everything on my machine over the holidays. I had tried everything, even stopping the DNS server/logging server services, Windows Defender, various options, all to no avail. (haven't tried the administrative mode yet though)

Just as I was referred from another post to this awesome post this morning, I realized that my machine had updated (and funny enough, also ran accuracy optimization) at 2 AM.

...and somehow, someway, it's now... Perfect?!

I had tried rebooting and a million other things before, but it's the 1st time it's been "ok" ever since I've installed it. I'm not sure if it's actually running the optimization, or the Windows update somehow, but it seems fixed.

I'll post back here if it ever gets worse again and I will try that admin thing.

Francois

We are betting on the Windows update. We recommend against letting Dragon optimize your user profile; along with 29 other recommendations that are detailed in the KnowBrainer Dragon Installation/Training Guide

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@May - I think you have explained the phenomenon. Now, several days later, the CPU noise is around 8% +/- 5%. However the machine is adequately responsive, so those suspected system calls are not overloading it at the moment. I may repeat the trick later (running Dragon as administrator), to see if I can get further improvement. Sitnduck has found respite.  How is Daz10000 going?

PS – Dragon refuses to be run as administrator, drops back to normal mode. This weakens May's explanation.

Following the partial success (reducing spurious system calls, by creating a new user when logged in as admin), I thought I might improve the situation by adding my custom words and "accuracy tuning" the new user. Disaster! Both the new and old users bogged the machine down as bad as it ever had been before.

Accordingly, I deleted all users, restarted the machine and Dragon, and created a new user - with my custom words. This time I did not opt for "accuracy tuning"! Now, as I write Dragon is well-behaved. When put to sleep, its CPU usage drops to zero.

I will tiptoe away at this point, with my fingers crossed.

Now you know why we recommended against optimizing your user file in the previously mentioned Dragon Installation/Training Guide. This is just 1 of what we consider to be 30 sandtraps

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Hello again, sports fans!

So things gradually degraded once more. I then tried setting/un-sitting a bunch of things which didn't seem to change anything. HOWEVER, upon restarting the app at some point, it got perfect again (0% usage with the microphone off). I will once again be on the lookout for a pattern when it inevitably gets worse...

Note that I didn't have to create a new user. I've also tried running in "compatibility mode", although things did get worse anyhow, so not totally sure… Will report back!

After several peaceful days, Dragon's background activity has been creeping up again. This time I tracked Natspeak.exe in Procmon.exe to try and track down a cause in the Procmon log. I failed, but you might be able to see a gremlin lurking in the story below.

I shut down everything except Dragon (mic off) and KornShell. (KornShell is a commandline shell and not likely to be be seen by Dragon as a combatant). Then I used procmon.exe to record conflicts. For three whole minutes after starting Procmon.exe, it recorded no Dragon conflict at all.  That may be a failure of Procmon rather than Dragon acting innocent.

Then with mic off, Dragon began to argue with registry, as has become familiar. The first entry of each such struggle (consisting of a few dozen arguments with registry lasting a fraction of a second) is always the same (including yesterday) -
(Time) natspeak.exe (tab) 15716 (tab) RegOpenKey (tab) HKCU\Software\Classes\WOW6432Node\CLSID\{7E5FE3D9-985F-4908-91F9-EE19F9FD1514} (tab) NAME NOT FOUND (tab) Desired Access: Read
Each struggle then continues from there with a series of "RegQueryValue" "RegOpenKey" failures, mainly resulting in "name not found", and "buffer overflow" errors.

When Dragon skirmishes with an executable, the errors start with "CreateFileMapping" resulting in "file locked with only readers". I guess that means Dragon is trying to create a file with a name that that other executable has open already.

After seven whole minutes of peace with other executables, Dragon attacked the KornShell.exe with a brief skirmish starting with "CreateFileMapping" as usual, then with the same "file locked" error messages, followed by a prolonged struggle with explorer.exe (which wasn't even open), possibly when trying to help open the closed file.

With the microphone on, Dragon became downright pugilistic. Error messages "file locked" or "name not found" result when it cannot "CreateFile", "ReadFile" etc in its normal operations on its own files such as acoustic.ini, datalocations.ini and so on. About the same time, it attacked MKS KornShell.exe, Chrome.exe (which was minimised) and VLC.exe (which was in a separate desktop) resulting in "file locked" error messages. The same error appeared against a broad variety of Windows executables. (Especially taskmgr.exe when used, so I will reduce use of taskmgr.exe!)

Perhaps all these conflicts are just smoke rising from a fire that we cannot see. At least we know that a clean restart can help.

 

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Win11, DNS 15.3 (It says "Espagnol" when opening, does anyone know why?)

Congratulations on learning to use Procmon! When I see the RegOpenKey failure, it makes me think of Lunis' story of his tech running an Administrator account for a while and then Dragon worked normally. In my imagination, the Admin account would have the privilege to create that missing key so that it would be there the next time Dragon wanted to open it for reading.


I could be wrong, but the CreateFileMapping scenario sounds like Dragon wants to access a file using a file mapping object, but Dragon's attempt to create the mapping object fails because of security protections on the target file that cause the CreateFileMapping API call to fail. Here is a link to the CreateFileMapping API. Maybe you can figure something out from it.

It sounds to me like many of the problems you list (excellent list, BTW) stem from the same problem - Dragon can't get access to the files that it wants to access through the CreateFileMapping calls. I wonder if the installed Dragon permissions or user account permissions are not what they should be. It might have something to do with the original registry key not being found. Maybe the GUID {7E5FE3D9 ... } is the name of the key or something. On my Win11 machine, I have no such registry key either.

 

It's worth saying that I experience the HATED, incredible slowdowns on my Win11 machine from time to time when I play with different microphones or if I leave the mic off (but Dragon loaded) overnight. A reboot is always required, with no messing with microphones. Dragon on Win11 likes to come up and find only one microphone to use. And I don't use Dragon all day. After a few hours or whatever, I exit Dragon.

 

I have none of these problems on my Win10 machine. I'm running DPI 15.3.

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Win10/11/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X/3950X, 64/128GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 7 Standard, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Amazon YUWAKAYI headset, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, excellent Sareville Wireless Mono Headset, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and Logitech G502 awesome gaming mouse.

I realized I wasn't getting notification of replies here, so sorry for not following up more quickly. After a long break, I tried running Dragon again today. It absolutely hammered the machine to the point where I could barely get it to respond. I slowly managed to open processexplorer and pulled up the threads and one thread was just going like crazy (10% of overall CPU time). I killed it and the machine is usable again. It's obviously trying something with the OS in the background and just failing but retrying and using up some system resource. it would take seconds to respond to a mouse click, or switch windows, even tracking the mouse pointer. The offending thread is

MSVCR110.dll!__get_tlsindex+0x6

I noticed there were several of these though. Only one was destroying the machine. I like the idea of running dragon as admin briefly to see if it can do whatever it is trying to do.

So knocking on wood, running in "Windows 7 compatibility" mode for a few weeks SEEMS to be okay for now still!... Anyone else tried that?

I thought I tried that earlier and it didn't work, but I tried again in desperation (after trying and failing to run in "admin mode", perhaps it was just a freak sequence of events that reset something (?!)).

MSVCR110.dll belongs to one of the MS Visual C++ runtimes, version 11, to be exact. This runtime is used by any number of programs, Dragon being only one of them. Could be that you're stuck in DLL hell when the same runtime is started by different applications, often from different locations. You'd have to find out which process uses this particular instance of MSVCR110.dll.

HTH, Stephan

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Stnduck - thank you! It worked for me too. Setting Dragon into "compatibility with Windows 7" quietens its madness.
(Find NatSpeak.exe, right click to get to Properties, then Compatibility tab, then select Windows 7).
The good behaviour is only relative and decays across a week of use, but that is still a godsend.

After setting compatibility to Win7, I export my custom_words, then zip away the old user, forcing Dragon to create a new one.
After setting my options, importing the custom_words, and making a backup of the newborn user, that only costs me half an hour.

Next time the madness becomes too frustrating for me, I will try using a restore of the newborn version.

PS ~10 days later.  The restore worked just fine.  Even on Win7 setting, Dragon's sanity had decayed.  Since I had saved a early version of a new user, the restore reset all the (corrupted?) files and Dragon returned to polite behaviour, although quietly mumbling to itself.  This is much faster and more convenient than creating an new user, loading custom words, and setting all my options that I can remember.  I don't yet know whether it is possible to create a new user on Win11 and save it (for a later restore) while it is still fresh and innocent.