When Commands Do Not Work
NaturallySpeaking Professional Commands -- What to Do When They Don't Work
NaturallySpeaking Professional Commands -- What to Do When They Don't Work
If NatSpeak is not accepting commands, possible courses of action after you verify you are saying a valid command in the right application are:
- Make certain you pause before AND after the command is spoken. Dragon uses these pauses to distinguish commands from dictation.
- Hold the Ctrl key down while issuing (speaking) the command. This forces command recognition. With long commands, this is sometimes needed the first few times a command is issued.
- The command may be defined for a different application than the one in which you are dictating. You can double-check this by going into Edit Commands and verifying that your created commands appear in the command lists for the appropriate application, or else in the Global command list.
- If the command names are close to phrases that might be dictated, sometimes the recognition is sporadic. That is, 80% of the time it may recognize it as a command, 20% of the time as dictation. Try making commands using juxtaposition of words or using infrequently-used words so Dragon is less likely to get confused. Avoid acronyms and words easily confused with frequently-used words. For instance:
Normal Chest -- poor command name, easily confused with dictation
Chest Normal -- better command name, still not very good
Chest Norm -- better
Macro Chest Norm -- unlikely to be confused with dictation
- On Release 2.0 Deluxe, there were instances where commands were not recognized and a new user file needed to be established. I've not seen that problem in Professional 3.0. Just to be safe, you should periodically save your speech files just as you would save other important documents.
- If dictating into MS-Word97 on Release 3.0, there is a repeatable problem involving dictation onto the last line of a window that causes the command text to appear instead of the command action being taken. This happens only if the words in the command include letters with descenders (i.e. "g", "j", "p", "q", "y" in most type fonts). It may only happen with specific views enabled in Word97.
- Failure to save speech files after creating commands makes new commands disappear.
- It is possible to create a command that does nothing if the script is not correct. Verify that any script not being recognized is a valid script.
- When debugging scripts, make liberal use of the "Wait" command so that you can better see the steps that are being taken. A "Wait 1000" inserted between each statement while debugging can make it easier to spot errors with a one-second wait between commands. Note that sometimes a "Wait" of 20-100msec is needed even when the macro is debugged.
- If you need to use a letter combined with an Alt or Ctrl key, it must be given in lower case. UPPER CASE letters won't work.
- Try turning NaturalText off if the command is for an application outside of NaturallySpeaking, Word97, or WordPerfect 8. This will restrict NaturallySpeaking to only recognizing commands.
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