March, 2001
UPGRADE USERS (27 December 2000): MY FIRST ATTEMPT AT USING THIS UPGRADE CAUSED ME TO NEED TO RERUN AUDIO SETUP WIZARD AND RETRAIN MY MIGRATED USERS. Apparently this is sometimes needed, sometimes not, but Dragon Tech Support was not helpful in sorting out when the General Training was needed. Be prepared for a few minutes of this training before starting your upgrade.
SAVE YOUR RELEASE 4.0 USER BEFORE DOING THE UPGRADE. C:\NatSpeak\Users\<user name>\current contains the key files to save.
COMMANDS/MACROS ARE NOT MIGRATED AUTOMATICALLY. BE PREPARED TO TACKLE THE JOB OF CREATING NEW USER COMMANDS. IF YOU USE KNOWBRAINER OR OTHER 3RD PARTY COMMANDS, CONTACT THAT VENDOR FOR UPDATES BEFORE EVEN THINKING ABOUT UPGRADING. IF YOU USE COMMANDS FURNISHED BY SOFTNET, CONTACT US FOR DETAILS REGARDING YOUR MIGRATION OF COMMANDS.
Sony VAIO Notebook Users: Be prepared for a "PCI" error message that has hit several owners of VAIO notebooks. Contact Sony or Dragon Tech Support if this problem arises. There is an updated driver for the Yamaha sound system.
Many users have reported successful upgrades. Slightly improved accuracy has been the most commonly noted benefit, followed by better ability to use Commands in Windows-2000.
The following comments reflect our initial impressions of Release 5 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking from late 2000.
Much of the following will only make sense to those who have used earlier releases of NaturallySpeaking. But new users should be able to find a hint or two on this page that will ease their life with NaturallySpeaking Release 5. The comments directly pertain to the Preferred Edition, which is what we've already seen and used. Most will probably apply to Standard, Essentials, Professional, Legal, and Medical. Please inform us if you find comments that don't apply to the version that you've got and we'll update this page.
There is now a "DragonBar" to help control Dragon, more control of Dragon feasible from the microphone icon on the Windows toolbar, and a renamed "DragonPad" application. You don't have to have DragonPad running while you are using Dragon in other applications.
The Dragon Toolbars have been changed. There are now fewer buttons on the toolbars for the DragonPad than there were on the NatSpeak 4.0 editor toolbar. The "Train Words" and "Find Words" were moved into menus -- a cosmetic change in my opinion as I didn't use these often.
You may find it useful to move the toolbar items on the DragonPad so there is only one full toolbar instead of two sparsely populated ones.
While moving toolbars, if one keeps the Dragon toolbar active, note that you can "anchor" the Results Box to the toolbar so that it doesn't often expand into other screen real estate.
Having the user name appear at the bottom of the DragonPad is handy for multi-user environments -- I wish the name also appeared on the DragonBar.
NaturallySpeaking is now, by default, installed in the Program Files directory. That will make many IS managers happier as it conforms to one more Windows convention. It also makes obsolete many of our references to the "C:\NatSpeak\..." directory. In most cases this should now be the C:\Program Files\Dragon Systems\NaturallySpeaking\..." directory.
The tutorial is expanded and interactive so it is probably a better learning tool (we say "probably" because we feel we are poor judges having used Dragon for over 3 years). It gives you a good chance to try new commands corresponding to each of the 13 lessons. It appears that a skilled user can add lessons to the tutorial.
You no longer have to say "Click" to get to menu items - a welcome relief!
The Dragon desktop icon is more appropriate, intuitive, and cute. No more tree.
Initial impressions are that in comparison with Release 4, words added using lists of words and/or Build Vocabulary (a.k.a. Vocabulary Builder) are recognized MUCH more readily than in Release 4. Accuracy seems at least as good as Release 4, but we have not yet made comparative measurements.
Build Vocabulary was run on a batch of medical (physical therapy) text including a word list and about 500KB of text data. Dictation results immediately thereafter were excellent, including recognition of phrases such as "4+/5" (said "four plus over five) and acronyms. Accuracy on this initial test was better than 99% -- higher than normal on that particular system. BUT WE'VE LEARNED THAT MANY FACTORS INFLUENCE ACCURACY SO YOUR RESULTS MAY BE DIFFERENT.
NatSpeak 5.0 defaulted to BestMatch Plus on a Pentium-II, 300 MHz system with 256MB. This proved to be unacceptably slow, with response times exceeding 30 seconds at times. Changing from BestMatch Plus to BestMatch cured the problem.
On the bright side, Edit Vocabulary no longer takes "forever" to load. It takes about 1 second, vs. several seconds on prior releases. Thanks, Dragon!
In the DragonPad, there doesn't appear to be anything new in the File, Edit, View, or Format menus. Most of the new material appears in the "NaturallySpeaking" menu item. Except for microphone on/off, these handy controls appear in a 2nd-level menu, adding a step to get to your favorite tools. The main sub-menu selections are "Words" and "Advanced"
The following items are accessed from the "Words" sub-menu from "NaturallySpeaking":
This is a function designed to add single words to the vocabulary. It is simple and has options to add a word, train a word, or to request help. Within the window you can spell (fairly accurate in my usage) and use commands such as Move Left/Right N Characters, Delete Next/Previous N Characters, Move to End of Line. For adding a single word, this may prove less daunting and more intuitive than the "Advanced" Edit Vocabulary (formerly Vocabulary Editor) function. You can not so far as I can tell provide a written form/spoken form as you can with the Edit Vocabulary function.
This is a subset of the Vocabulary Builder function. It has buttons to Add Folder (handy function), Add Document, Remove Document, View Document, Preview Words, Cancel, and Help.
Using this, I found that words such as "VoiceIt" and "Emkay" are not even in the backup dictionary. These are words which would be used around Dragon on a fairly regular basis, so it puzzles me why these have not yet been introduced at least into the backup dictionary.
If you use this, be absolutely certain to use the "preview words" even though it does not suggest doing so. Otherwise, words which are misspelled or which for other reasons you do not want will be added without any review by you. IMHO, this step should be suggested by the help. This function is not as powerful and flexible as the Vocabulary Builder (now called Build Vocabulary in the Advanced tools) but it may suffice for some users.
If you select Word Perfect documents and do not have WordPerfect installed, or if you select a Word document and you do not have Word installed, you get an error.
Repeated use of this function on one machine pulled up multiple copies of Word97. If this happens to you, be sure to close them out promptly else you may find yourself in a bit of a mess as Word97 wasn't really built to have multiple copies run at once.
This is essentially the same as the "Train Words" in the previous versions of the product. One difference is that there is no longer a Train Words button on the toolbar for what is now called the "DragonPad".
This is a major new feature for Preferred edition users. (Sorry, but Essentials and Standard edition users don't have the same capability.) This makes it possible for Preferred users to make multiline text macros (commands) -- that is, you now have a function so that you can say "widget" and have the program automatically spew out several paragraphs. Your formatting is limited to the "Enter" key and the "Tab" key. That can go a long way towards improving document production.
This also allows, in an indirect manner, use of the Word AutoCorrect function. By putting a space character as the last entry in your Dictation Shortcut text, you can say one word or phrase, have Dragon recognize it as another word/phrase FOLLOWED BY A SPACE, then have the Word AutoCorrect function turn it into something entirely different. This can allow you to format text, include graphics, etc. if you are so inclined.
WordPerfect 9 (a.k.a. WordPerfect 2000) users will find that Dictation Shortcuts can be used to trigger QuickWords -- but as this was already doable with Release 4, it isn't as big a deal.
Dictation Shortcuts narrowed the gap between Preferred and Professional when your primary purpose is document production.
This feature, when selected, causes NaturallySpeaking to only recognize numbers, commands (including Dictation Shortcuts), and a few symbols including:
? ( ) % $ . , ; : - +
So far, I've not found a list telling exactly what is/is not recognized in numbers mode. Roman numerals are not recognized. The word "and" is recognized and printed -- who knows what else may be lurking under the surface of this new function.
Numbers Mode acts somewhat like Sleep Mode except that numbers, when spoken as if they are commands, are spoken.
For those of you who disabled NaturalText to have a "Command-Only" interface, Numbers Mode seems to be the closest way to do the same thing in Release 5.
Formatting of numbers seems no better, no worse than dictating numbers in other contexts. I've not learned the formula for when one MUST dictate a "Press space-bar" or "tab-key" between numbers and when one doesn't need to. It is frustrating to dictate "one-hundred", then have a long pause, then dictate "forty-three" and end up with 143 -- not 100 43. If/when you figure out the rules, please e-mail them to us! You can change the rules by using the Options in the Advanced menu -- but the rules don't seem consistent to me no matter how the options are set.
There are no other differences with the rest of the Correction tab in 5.0 and options that were available in the Options box of 4.0.
There are two sections to this tab in the Options box. The first one deals with the appearance of the DragonBar, and the second one with the results box. The results box options are no different from those in previous versions of NaturallySpeaking.
One Release 4 feature is deleted from Release 5. One can not disable what was known as the "NaturalText" feature using the mouse. Disabling this feature caused only Dragon "commands" to be recognized. Numbers Mode works very similar to disabled NaturalText except that numbers are recognized.
The "Correct That" command hardly works at all on Release 5. Pretend the command does not exist at all and you will be less frustrated. Use the hot key for correction or else specify the words you wish to correct.
The parent company, Lernout & Hauspie, is in financial difficulty. There is a risk that long-term support and development of future revisions could be affected by a reorganization of the company. (Note -- ScanSoft acquired the assets of the company in late 2001)
Thanks to Chad for furnishing much of this review on extremely short notice! Thanks to Richards for confirmation of some of the above information. Thanks to Dragon for making improvements that should make it easier for users to be comfortable using NaturallySpeaking within the first few hours of use.
Want to Buy? We no longer sell Release 5 products.
Updated October 11, 2000 with minor changes for formatting and marketing information March 2004
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