Thursday, December 11, 2008
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Internet Explorer versus Mozilla Firefox
Sadly, I've come to the realization that Dragon NaturallySpeaking just works better with Internet Explorer than with Mozilla Firefox. Here are a few examples:
I have not tried using Firefox 3 yet with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
If you are going to use Internet Explorer, you should upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. This new version adds a lot of safety and convenience features. In addition, you should probably download and install the Internet Explorer add-in IE 7 Pro, which you can read about in this life hacker link.
- In Internet Explorer you can speak all or some of the link text to activate the link. In Firefox, you have to speak the whole link text.
- In Internet Explorer if you speak a word that matches to more than one link, you get a little arrow that underlines each occurrence. In Firefox, nothing happens and you have to say the whole link text.
- I cannot get Dragon to accurately activate any of the bookmark buttons on my bookmarks tool bar.
- In Internet Explorer you can speak a URL by prefacing HTTP or www and Dragon will format what you speak correctly. I cannot get Firefox to replicate this behavior reliably.
I have not tried using Firefox 3 yet with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
If you are going to use Internet Explorer, you should upgrade to Internet Explorer 7. This new version adds a lot of safety and convenience features. In addition, you should probably download and install the Internet Explorer add-in IE 7 Pro, which you can read about in this life hacker link.
Monday, April 21, 2008
hardware system requirements
My friend Molly recently posted on her blog about hardware system requirements for speech recognition. I believe that her recommendations are overstated, although your experience may vary depending on what software you're running at any one time.
Nuance' s system requirements for Dragon NaturallySpeaking are the following: 1 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, 1 GB hard drive space.
Molly's recommendation is for a 3 GHz and dual core CPU, 3 GB of RAM, and a 160 GB, 10,000 RPM hard drive.
My computer is currently a single core processor running at 1.5 GHz, 1.5 GB of RAM, and a 150 GB hard drive running at 7000 RPM (I'm not so sure about the speed).
It's very easy to find out if your computer is the bottleneck for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. While you are using the program, right-click on your Windows taskbar and select task manager. Go to the performance tab and pay attention to the CPU usage graph. You'll notice that it will fluctuate quite a bit as he do different tasks with your computer. When I'm dictating my CPU goes up to 100% sometimes, but only for short periods of time, perhaps a few seconds. Another thing to pay attention to is the physical memory section of the performance tab, especially the number next to a available memory. My computer currently shows that I have about 800 MB of RAM free.
With a 32-bit version of Windows, I'm not sure how well Windows or Dragon would take advantage of a dual-core processor.
Another useful thing to do with Windows task manager is to go to the process tab. One of the columns on the process tab should be memory usage. If you click that column header you should be able to sort the list of programs there by how much memory they are taking up. Currently for me, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is taking about 170 MB of RAM. It is highly unlikely that unless I was working with a lot of video files or large Photoshop files, that RAM would be a problem for my system.
However, if I were using some programs that were CPU intensive, it is possible that my CPU would become the bottleneck.
Overall, unless Dragon is saving a lot of your speech files all at once or doing its adaptive learning, it will not be accessing your hard drive very much. So hard drive space and speed will probably not be the limiting factor.
A faster more powerful computer is always better. However if you have any reasonably recent vintage computer, say within the last three years, most likely your computer is not going to be a problem for you. So I would not rush out and buy a new computer just if you're going to start using speech recognition, unless your computer is very old.
RAM and hard drives are relatively cheap; actually RAM is absurdly cheap right now. So if you want to knock yourself out go out and buy upgrades for your computer. However if you have a slow processor most likely you would have to buy a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM. This would still be cheaper than a new computer, but it is more work to find the components and install them.
Nuance' s system requirements for Dragon NaturallySpeaking are the following: 1 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, 1 GB hard drive space.
Molly's recommendation is for a 3 GHz and dual core CPU, 3 GB of RAM, and a 160 GB, 10,000 RPM hard drive.
My computer is currently a single core processor running at 1.5 GHz, 1.5 GB of RAM, and a 150 GB hard drive running at 7000 RPM (I'm not so sure about the speed).
It's very easy to find out if your computer is the bottleneck for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. While you are using the program, right-click on your Windows taskbar and select task manager. Go to the performance tab and pay attention to the CPU usage graph. You'll notice that it will fluctuate quite a bit as he do different tasks with your computer. When I'm dictating my CPU goes up to 100% sometimes, but only for short periods of time, perhaps a few seconds. Another thing to pay attention to is the physical memory section of the performance tab, especially the number next to a available memory. My computer currently shows that I have about 800 MB of RAM free.
With a 32-bit version of Windows, I'm not sure how well Windows or Dragon would take advantage of a dual-core processor.
Another useful thing to do with Windows task manager is to go to the process tab. One of the columns on the process tab should be memory usage. If you click that column header you should be able to sort the list of programs there by how much memory they are taking up. Currently for me, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is taking about 170 MB of RAM. It is highly unlikely that unless I was working with a lot of video files or large Photoshop files, that RAM would be a problem for my system.
However, if I were using some programs that were CPU intensive, it is possible that my CPU would become the bottleneck.
Overall, unless Dragon is saving a lot of your speech files all at once or doing its adaptive learning, it will not be accessing your hard drive very much. So hard drive space and speed will probably not be the limiting factor.
A faster more powerful computer is always better. However if you have any reasonably recent vintage computer, say within the last three years, most likely your computer is not going to be a problem for you. So I would not rush out and buy a new computer just if you're going to start using speech recognition, unless your computer is very old.
RAM and hard drives are relatively cheap; actually RAM is absurdly cheap right now. So if you want to knock yourself out go out and buy upgrades for your computer. However if you have a slow processor most likely you would have to buy a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM. This would still be cheaper than a new computer, but it is more work to find the components and install them.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
some background about me
so, I've been suffering from various RSI symptoms for the past nine years. Initially the problem was with my wrists and hands. I want to various doctors and there is no conclusive diagnosis, but seem not to be carpel tunnel and more like a tendinitis. Through frequent breaks and wearing of wrist braces, that got better. I'm still braced them a lot of the time but I am not in pain from my wrists much anymore. However about nine months ago I started getting a lot of pain in my shoulders, primarily my right shoulder. I've been going physical therapy for about six months and then going to a massage therapist for about a month and a half.
I got to a point where I wasn't getting worse, but I wasn't getting better while I was still working. So, I quit my job about one week ago, and I've been trying these computer as little as possible since then. It's very difficult.
In order to be able to use a computer, and not continue to injure myself, I am learning to use Dragon. Here's a link to an old forum post that I found about using Dragon and Firefox together. http://www.speechcomputing.com/node/942. One of the suggestions that I'm trying out right now is the use of the mouse lists browser extension, which if you're not familiar with it, puts numbers next to each link on the page that you can then type on a keyboard or with dragon speak the equivalent. One thing to note though, is that the defaults option for it requires you to press enter before it will follow the link.
Also, something helpful that I've been using for years he is the ergonomic timer "work rave", which you can find on sourceforge.net.
This post was composed probably about 75% with Dragon. One of the problems with using Dragon and Firefox is that Dragon treats all text entry fields in Firefox as nonstandard applications, so doesn't work as well. One workaround would be to dictate into the Dragon pad and then copy and paste whatever you're dictating into the appropriate Firefox field.
Todd
I got to a point where I wasn't getting worse, but I wasn't getting better while I was still working. So, I quit my job about one week ago, and I've been trying these computer as little as possible since then. It's very difficult.
In order to be able to use a computer, and not continue to injure myself, I am learning to use Dragon. Here's a link to an old forum post that I found about using Dragon and Firefox together. http://www.speechcomputing.com/node/942. One of the suggestions that I'm trying out right now is the use of the mouse lists browser extension, which if you're not familiar with it, puts numbers next to each link on the page that you can then type on a keyboard or with dragon speak the equivalent. One thing to note though, is that the defaults option for it requires you to press enter before it will follow the link.
Also, something helpful that I've been using for years he is the ergonomic timer "work rave", which you can find on sourceforge.net.
This post was composed probably about 75% with Dragon. One of the problems with using Dragon and Firefox is that Dragon treats all text entry fields in Firefox as nonstandard applications, so doesn't work as well. One workaround would be to dictate into the Dragon pad and then copy and paste whatever you're dictating into the appropriate Firefox field.
Todd
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Desktop Speech Recognition and Me
So, I've quit my job and am taking time off to recuperate from ergonomic injuries. A colleague and friend of mine, Molly, who is an expert speech rec user recently started a blog (http://voiceuser.blogspot.com/) about her experiences and suggested that I do the same.
I've used Dragon sporadically for the past six months with mixed success. I've also tried the MS Windows XP built-in product, and today just downloaded and installed Opera and it's Opera-only speech rec package.
Please check back for sporadic updates about my progress and what I've learned.
Todd
I've used Dragon sporadically for the past six months with mixed success. I've also tried the MS Windows XP built-in product, and today just downloaded and installed Opera and it's Opera-only speech rec package.
Please check back for sporadic updates about my progress and what I've learned.
Todd
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