Mediocre performance Options

[mattwood]

I am frustrated with the mediocre performance I am getting with DNS 4.0 Preferred. It seems that the solution is always upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, but the product never delivers what it supposed to! My computer is an AMD K-6II 450. I upgraded from DNS Standard to DNS 4.0 Preferred. I then "upgraded" to 256 mgs of RAM. I then "upgraded" to an Andrea ANC 600 microphone. I have now "upgraded" from a Soundblaster 128 PCI to a Soundblaster Live! 5.1. When I ran the audio wizard with the new card, my overall score was a 19, which is only acceptable. No matter how much I use it, it still makes regular mistakes, and I have dictated a lot of notes into this machine. I have leaned my machine to have 95% system resources. It's better, but not what DNS states it can do. What I am looking for is advice, without further "upgrading", to improve performance. I know my enunciation is a problem at times, but even when I focus, it still can make simple mistakes, and sometimes comes up with phrases and words that make no sense. There is little to no noise in the office, so that's not a problem. Any advice, except upgrading, is very much appreciated. By the way, is the old Dragon forum no longer in existence? That was an excellent source for advice and I hope this forum is as well.

[This message has been edited by mattwood (edited 02-10-2002).]

[John Wickett]

mattwood,

You sound like a very frustrated user!

Your hardware should certainly be acceptable to run DNS version 4 preferred. The one thing that stands out to me is that after all your upgrades, have you created a new user? The voice files that you originally created will certainly not be acceptable for accurate recognition after all the upgrades that you have put on your computer. I would suggest that you create a new user, do the training (yes, I know it is a pain) and then see what happens. I suspect that you will see quite a difference.

By the way, I am not sure which forum you are referring to, but what I consider to be the old dragon forum can be found at http://support.lhsl.com/databases/dragon/w...nView&Count=100

John
Dictated with Dragon Naturally Speaking
John Wickett
PEI Canada
902-368-0141
902-651-2152
jwickett@auracom.com
jcwicket@vac-acc.gc.ca

[This message has been edited by John Wickett (edited 02-10-2002).]

[mattwood]

John,

I appreciate your reply and I have not created a new user after all of the upgrades. I thought the idea was to keep adding to your speech files so that DNS would keep getting better. I will give this a try. What would be a realistic expectation of DNS in terms of accuracy with the hardware I have? Also, do you abandon the original user that I created and focus on improving the new one? Also, thanks for the link. I do believe that is the old forum that was originally on the DNS website. I guess that L&S moved it to theirs. I will give it another try before I start using my computer as a boat anchor. Thanks a bunch John.

[This message has been edited by mattwood (edited 02-10-2002).]

[John Wickett]

mattwood,

Sometimes Durons are quite noisy and this interfers with voice recognition. If your machine is not one of the noisy ones then, if you dictate well, you should get 97-98% accuracy. If your machine is noisy then you will have to live with less.

One of the members of this forum typically reports 99-100% accuracy using DNS version 6 on an AMD Duron.

John

[Judy Evans]

Mattwood

Have you checked Boost on the SoundBlaster? (19 is not an unusual reading for the ANC 600 -- and upwards -- mikes anyway; but if your new reading is less than it was with the previous card, make sure Boost is on).

Also check to see whether you have a "noisy" SoundBlaster Live. (My SB Lives have always been good, but some people find they give a high noise reading.)

You won't want to hear this, still: 5.0 is much better for recognition than 4.0...; but it would be best if you worked on recognition with your current setup before upgrading again....

Finally as John says -- and this is the most important point -- create a new user

Judy

[John Wickett]

Judy,

Good point as usual! :-)

Mattwood should create a .wav file and then play it back and see how noisy it is.

John
Dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking
-----------------------------------------------
John Wickett
902-368-0141
jcwicket@vac-acc.gc.ca
jwickett@auracom.com