Dragon Naturally Speaking

[jmazor]

I've just started with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred, and I want to take advantage of the many MX3 macro's that I already have -- preferably without having to "train" DNS with new words or commands. But something is not right.

 

Example: I have a MX3 macro that types "Clerk of the 11th Circuit Court" when I type the shortkey ".k11 " (i.e., ".k11" followed by a space).

 

But when I speak ".k11 ", DNS types ".k11 ", but even if I physically hit the spacebar, nothing happens, i.e., MX3 does not trigger the ".k11" shortkey.

 

I know that I can train DNS to type "Clerk of the 11th Circuit Court" when it hears me say ".k11". But I would have to do that for every one of the shortkeys that I already use in MX3. That will take forever.

 

Is there any way to get MX3 to recognize shortkeys regardless of whether my fingers or DNS does the "typing"?

 

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

Jeffrey R. Mazor

[kevin]

When we did some research on Dragon Naturally Speaking we discovered that it blocks the Widows 'hooks'. That means that shortkey and hotkey activations will not work. There is a pro version of Dragon Naturally Speaking that does not block the hooks but it is more expensive.

 

The Pro version of DNS has some macro capabilities built in. We suspect that the authors intentionally block the hooks to limit the features in the standard version.

 

Joe had some success having a macro scan a log file that was created by DNS and taking action based on the content of the log file.

[kistonewa]

I've just started with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred, and I want to take advantage of the many MX3 macro's that I already have -- preferably without having to "train" DNS with new words or commands. But something is not right.

 

Example: I have a MX3 macro that types "Clerk of the 11th Circuit Court" when I type the shortkey ".k11 " (i.e., ".k11" followed by a space).

 

But when I speak ".k11 ", DNS types ".k11 ", but even if I physically hit the spacebar, nothing happens, i.e., MX3 does not trigger the ".k11" shortkey.

 

I know that I can train DNS to type "Clerk of the 11th Circuit Court" when it hears me say ".k11". But I would have to do that for every one of the shortkeys that I already use in MX3. That will take forever.

 

Is there any way to get MX3 to recognize shortkeys regardless of whether my fingers or DNS does the "typing"?

 

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

Jeffrey R. Mazor

 

 

There is a program called Vocola which is designed to add macros to the Preferred or the professional version of DNS. I have experimented in a very limited extent with it. I was able to get it to run my shortkey macros; however, I was writing a very short Vocola macro for each activation. For example one macro I would say "plink 18" and it would pass on the shortkey text to activate a shortkey macro which charted the full documentation for starting an 18 gauge IV. Vocola can use some recursive functions which incorporate part of the spoken phrase; therefore, I think it may be possible to define a macro in Vocola which starts with a phrase such as "macro x" in which you would say "macro .k11" and it would run its macro function passing on .k11 as the macro text. This would activate the macro shortkey. I would recommend posting this question in www.speechcomputing.com. There are a number of Vocola users that frequent that user group. They would be able to tell you if it is possible and point you to the most active Vocola sites.

 

In experimenting using ME with DNS I have found that one has to use advanced scripting SendDragonKeys function to pass text to MacroExpress. SendSystemKeys may also work. Advanced scripting is only available in the Professional, medical, and legal versions which are expensive.

[jmazor]

Thanks to both of you. I'm thinking that it may just be best to go ahead and use the Dragon Command tool to program in the shortkeys I want!

 

Jeff

[ejs]

Jeff

 

I use dragon 8 preferred, which is probably not much different from dragon 9.

 

I entered all of my short keys into the dragon vocabulary and trained dragon with my pronunciation.

 

Here are a few things that helped make the job go easier

 

1) have a list set up in advance with all the words/phrases you want to put into dragon

 

2) do the entry through words: view/edit instead of words: new

 

the two limitations of words: new is that it assumes you only want to enter one word, so the dialog box disappears as soon as you finish with that word. Also, it does not present you with the properties button, which you'll need in order to set a different written form from the spoken form. I'm not sure if you plan on training Dragon for the literal text, or if you are going to train dragon for the short key spoken form and tell dragon that spoken form should be expanded to a different written form. I personally have found using the different written form to be a handy way of tricking dragon into writing what I want for words that it tends to "mishear"

 

3) write a macro express macro to expedite pressing the dragon buttons for adding and training the new words you enter. I use macro express and dragon because of carpal tunnel, and if I am adding 100+ words to dragon, I can eliminate a lot of mouse clicking I have a macro express do it for me. Eg, after I typed in my new word, I typed the hotkey to activate the macro, and that clicks the series of dragon buttons to add the word and start recording.

[ejs]

In my last post, I forgot to mention that DNS preferred v 8 (on Windows XP Pro sp1) does type out dictated text in such a way that macro express short keys will be invoked in SOME applications.

 

I'm still using Word 97. If my dictation is within this application, and I dictate a short key, macro express will expand the short key.

 

But if I'm dictating into outlook 2002 or my text editor, the short key will not be recognized by macro express.