Known Problems, Releases 3, 4, 5
Release 5 Problems
Like most software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking has several known problems. Some of these may exist in Release 4 and
earlier releases. The ScanSoft Knowledgebase references these and many other errors, but at the time this page was first produced, there was not a public listing of known problems in NaturallySpeaking.
- Mousegrid flashes, disappears, not usable. This has happened on some machines at some times since Release 3 with no apparent solution.
- Commands for a particular application stop working, particularly after closing then opening applications. This is a known problem with early versions of Release 5. Call Dragon Tech Support and you might win a replacement CD! Also see posted Tech Note on this topic.
- In Word 2000, you can't control all the dialog boxes and menus. No fix is available (May 2001), try alternate commands (Move Up/Down, Press , etc.) to work around the problem.
- "Jumping Cursor" in Internet Explorer, specifically jumping to the beginning of a text box. Look for a fix to web_ie.dll on Dragon web site.
- Invalid Page Faults in Explorer -- particularly when using Word. No known cure.
- Telex P-500 USB Microphone won't work -- ask Dragon Tech Support for the procedure to fix this problem. (Or get a better microphone/USB pod)
- When you delete words, an extra space may be deleted causing words to runtogether. No known fix.
- In Word-97 or Word-2000, use of "advanced" features such as Table of Contents, "Private" fields, pictures, objects, and probably several other features cause extra/missing characters later in the document when dictating or correcting. No known cure except to dictate into simple documents with minimal formatting.
- PCI Parity Error when first using Dragon on certain systems with Yamaha sound systems. Dragon and Yamaha have copies of updated drivers for this problem.
- Number formatting is not consistent -- sorry, this is a problem with speech recognition programs of all sorts. It is tough for them to guess what is wanted. Changing the settings can influence the problem, as can running the Vocabulary Builder or creating phrases with common numbers. Upgrading to Release 8 is the best solution, as control of number formatting is excellent though sometimes time-consuming to set up.
- Capitalization does not "stick" after correction. This is a long-time problem when the vocabulary includes phrases with capitalization.
- AM/PM doesn't come out correctly. You may be able to resolve this by changing your default Windows settings (Control Panel/Regional Settings) to the desired format.
- Contractions appear often, even in formal writing. Solution: delete the contractions using Vocabulary Editor when feasible. A few contractions can't easily be deleted. For them, put in a written form/spoken form of the word.
- Leaving the microphone off for long periods (e.g. more than an hour) makes it difficult for Dragon to recognize "Wake Up". No known fix.
- C++ Runtime Error -- get correction from Dragon Tech Support or web site.
- Commands including "that" sometimes act upon other words such as "at". If this happens frequently, one can change these commands using the options.ini file.
- Faults with a "c0000005" message -- these have a number of causes including defective memory, other hardware problems, program conflicts with other programs, etc. Good Luck!
- In Outlook, Select-and-Say fails to work and the recognition is poor when compared to results when used in Microsoft Word. (Several have reported this general problem, with no known general solution.)
- One may be unable to directly dictate into IE 5+ executed ActiveX resident MS TextBoxes. (not a problem in NaturallySpeaking 4)
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WordPerfect Office 2002 Installation Hints for Release 5
For Corel Office 2002 users, one reported means to install Release 5 such that most functions work is:
- Save your Pro 5 user files.
- Completely remove DNS Pro 5, not saving the user files.
- Install the copy of DNS from Corel Office 2002.
- Go through initial training of a user.
- Reinstall DNS Pro 5 using the "Modify" option when installing.
- (At this point, there is a question as to how to restore user files. Hopefully this will be resolved by May 19, 2001.)
Release 4 Problems
The following are problems known to exist in Release 4.0. Items on this list have been seen on multiple machines. These are problems for which Dragon has not posted (so far as I can find) technical notes. It is possible that the solution to some of these problems must be furnished by another party -- Microsoft, Corel, etc. Keep in mind that the known problem lists for well-known programs like MS-Word2000 are quite long, and that the existance of problems does not mean the program should be discarded!
1. If the Active Accessibility option in Dragon is turned ON, then Solitaire does not work while NaturallySpeaking is running. (Either turn Active Accessibility off, or shut down Dragon NaturallySpeaking while playing Solitaire.)
2. The "MenuPick" command runs very slowly when Active Accessibility is on (Win95 -- unknown on other OS's)
3. With Active Accessibility on, in some programs (EMACS is an example), the selection is off by one menu item. This may be an NT-only problem.
4. With Active Accessibility on, there may be a 10-second pause in response each time you change windows. This also seems to happen more when you upgrade from Release 3.x to Release 4.0 than if you install Release 4.0 from scratch.
5. Though not specifically a problem, in many cases the "Wait" times in commands need to be increased for Release 4.0 to be reliable. This can cause "old" commands to not work properly.
6. On many systems, the Audio Setup Wizard needs to be re-run each time the system is rebooted. See the Dragon web site for more details. Fix for Audio Setup Wizard may help some of you.
7. Using Word97, commands are sometimes not recognized properly when the text is at the very bottom of the current window. This particularly occurs when the bottom parts of letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, y) have the very bottom part of the letter "cut off" in the window. (Problem may occur with other word processors.)
8. Using Word2000, there is sometimes a hang upon termination of Word and Dragon.
9. Using Text-to-Speech, there is sometimes a major interpretation problem. Try "I hope that Dr. Smith will rub my back" for some fun :-)
10. Both with and without AutoFormat, digit strings sometimes add spaces or drop digits. For instance, "one oh oh one" may produce "101" or "1 00 1".
11. DNS eliminates the space between a number and the word following. For example, if I dictate "one point two volts" it may come up as "1.2 volts." When I go to the correction box, I type in "1.2 V" or alternatively choose the selection which shows this. After I press enter and leave the correction box, the text will appear as "1.2V" with no space.
12. DNS takes words in all-caps when corrected and changes them to lowercase. One can dictate a term then go to the correction box to correct it. One can capitalize the term, hit enter, and it comes up as lowercase (or the wrong case) in the document.
13. Use of capitalized "words" such as "OK" and "IN" in command names may not work as expected because Dragon expects one to say "Oklahoma" to get "OK" and "Indiana" to get "IN". Use lowercase for this type of word in command names to avoid the problem.
14. Dictating times of day, Dragon presumes you want the Windows default form of "AM" or "PM". Unfortunately, they don't tell you this anywhere. One option is to change the Windows default (Control Panel, Regional Settings, then Time).
Suspected Problems
1. In Word2000, many commands don't work correctly and reliably if there are multiple documents open.
2. There are multiple reports of Medical BestMatch Plus accuracy degrading over a few hours of usage. (There are also reports of same feature being exceptionally accurate!)
3. There are reports of problems using Exceed and Norton Crash Guard causing repeated crashes.
4. MouseGrid does not work properly on some Windows-2000 systems. In at least one such case, it works properly when using Windows-95 on the same system, leading us to speculate that the Windows changes broke the MouseGrid functionality.
Release 3.52 (or earlier) Problems, Solved in Release 4
- "\Cap" in commands did not work in Release 3.52, now it is fixed. (There is a workaround by making up a new word to replace "\Cap" and then using VocEdit, set the properties to always capitalize next word and no space following the word.)
- Dictating blood pressure (e.g. one twenty over eighty) now produces an acceptable result.
- One can now have a Table of Contents in Word97 and not have problems dictating the rest of the document.
- DON'T INSTALL DNS IN A ROOT DIRECTORY! IF YOU DO THIS, THEN DO NOT UNINSTALL DNS UNTIL THE DRIVE IS BACKED UP. THE UNINSTALL MAY WIPE OUT ALL FILES ON THE DRIVE.
- The 3.52 upgrade installation program has problems with directory names with spaces. Specifically, don't install it in the Program Files directory! If already installed in such a directory, look for a note in the ScanSoft Knowledgebase, Tech Note 3818.
This problem exists when you use long filenames with spaces etc. in the version 3.52 installation program. When upgrading from 3.0 to 3.52, on a system that has a long filename in the path, the 3.52 installation program generates an error saying you can't use these characters to install the program. If you choose a different path the 3.52 program errors out saying it can't find a qualifying program at the path given and to recheck the path.
- Using MS Word97 with MS Outlook and NaturalWord slows most machines to an
absolute crawl. One can use NaturallySpeaking with Outlook if Outlook is set
to plain text mail format. There is something about the three-way interaction
between Word97, Outlook and NaturalWord that gives the PC fits--even a very
fast one.
GENERAL WINDOWS PROBLEMS
1. There can be "dll conflicts" (sometimes known as "dll hell") between Dragon and other programs, particularly if the other vendors supply some of their own versions of common Windows routines. This is a cause for many Windows problems and is not likely to be fixed by Microsoft for many years.
2. WordPerfect 8 needed to be at least at Service Pack 5 to work well with NaturallySpeaking 3 or later.
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