Dragon Naturally Speaking

What works

Installation ran flawlessly.

After installation, before launching the program, I ran winecfg and selected the OSS audio driver (deselecting ALSA) only. No other changes such as purging pulseaudio were necessary.

To use a USB headset, I opened Gnome's Sound preferences and selected the headset as the default input and output, and set the microphone's volume control to "unamplified".

After launching the newly-installed program, creating a new user allowed me to select "USB Device" as the audio input/output.

I then went through the rest of the new user setup without difficulty, and did the Kennedy speech training.

Recognition was fast and accurate for a several page test in DragonPad.

The spoken command Correct "word" works.

What does not

"Spell That" does not work (shows an error). The "Spell That" dialog cannot be closed but can be ignored and dictation can continue after the error. Subsequent "spell that" commands reproduce the error dialog box.

Most commands, such as "Go to end", "select all", "undo" etc. are recognised but have no effect.

"Acoustic and Language Model Optimizer" runs but did not complete. The program effectively hangs afterwards.

There are some problems drawing the menus that do not affect usability.

Help does not run.

The first time the program is launched, a dialog about scheduled accuracysomething or other warns that a scheduled task failed to run. I chose "do not tell me about this again" and it hasn't reappeared.

The spell that error dialog box says

COM returned an unexpected error code: Details are RPCInternal error (RPC_S_INTERNAL_ERROR, 1766)

The Acoustic and Language Model optimizer gets half way through and then shows a dialog box that says 

Failed to connect to NaturallySpeaking for the following reason: 0xC0000005 - .

Workarounds

What was not tested

Anything not mentioned; advanced features.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I am very excited to see this program almost fully functional.

There are more complete installation and setup notes on the version 7 entry, many of which will also apply to v10 though expect some differences due to changes in WINE as well as DNS. 

 This should however be a useful reference.

 The following notes were contributed by Gurdil to set up DNS 10 and Wine to work with Pulse Audio on *buntu . Not tested elsewhere but may well have broader application.

padsp command is the key and is pulse audio specific.

1. wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

sh winetricks fontfix fontsmooth-gray gecko sound=oss gdiplus

2. Insert the installation CD then copy contents to the hard disk, ~/DNS for example

3. cd ~/DNS/issetupprerequisites, run "wine vcruntime.exe"

4. cd ~/DNS and run "wine setup". Proceed with the installation. At the end choose to register with printing something

5. run "padsp winecfg". Go to audio and choose alsa.

6. run DNS with: "padsp wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Nuance/NaturallySpeaking10/Program/natspeak.exe" If it crashes, run it again.

7. Now it should work. If it does not detect your microphome (or explains that sound is too low), try to configure your input device (menu>sound and video>pulse audio control)

Some editing commands work in notepad, and the recognition is still almost as fast as in DictationBox. For right now, I recommend dictating directly into Notepad.

The program no longer freezes when using Notepad. It sometimes still does after using DictationBox extensively. For instance, I dictate 4-6 paragraphs at a time, and after about the third session of that, the program sometimes behaves strangely. Usually what happens first is that the command "Transfer" does not drop text automatically into the other program.

Solution, just go to the other application -- be it wine or Linux -- and hit CTL-V and the text will drop.

Interesting note, unrelated to Wine... Dictation accuracy changes when switching from Notepad to DictationBox. Usually drops a bit at first.

These instructions are primarily for Ubuntu / Debian but should be helpful to other distros. 

In terminal:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

sh winetricks fontfix fontsmooth-gray gecko sound=oss

(also add gdiplus if you want a prettier DragonBar.)

winecfg

(in winecfg, go to audio tab and check oss driver only, then bump the default sample rate to 48000)

navigate to CD rom and type

wine setup

When evaluating install-menu options, remember that the program will need to run simply. Disable options that require searching your hard drive, automatic updating, sending data to Nuance, etc. Don't install or enable training.

The way to get fast, accurate dictation is to use Notepad or DictationBox. DragonPad works and has some extra commands but it is not as fast. It also has some quirks. Default font cannot be changed, for instance.

Once you have the program up and running, you should be able to use Dictation Box, say "Transfer that" and then use CTL-V to paste into any running Linux application. To enable this feature, open Dictation Box / Settings, and check the box to keep transferred text on the clipboard.

Note: I compiled wine from git using ./configure --enable-win64 and NatSpeak ran just fine. (However, check your Natspeak version. Only 10.1 is 64-bit enabled.)

Additional Instructions:

As of 10.10 Ubuntu, pulseaudio is enabled by default. I have not had luck getting wine programs running with pulse. To disable it, edit /etc/pulse/client.conf to change # autospawn = yes to autospawn = no.

Then System/preferences/startup applications, uncheck everything that says pulse. Then reboot.

If you want to use a USB device, this must be set as the default device. So add to your home directory a file called .asoundrc that contains the following text. (This assumes that you have only two devices, that card 0 is your on-board and card 1 is your usb.)

pcm.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
}
ctl.!default {
    type hw
    card 1
}

It is my experience that the Nuance licensing daemon now counts each new version of wine as a "new operating system." Upgrades between, say Ubuntu Karmic and Ubuntu Lucid, also use up a license. And you also lose a license when you have NatSpeak installed twice on the same computer.

I had been installing test versions daily, always on the same machine, always using the latest wine git, and now can no longer do so. So new users may not want to install or test casually. 

Note: Changing the Windows Version in winecfg counts as an operating system upgrade. For this reason, it is recommended to install DNS10 under an alternate $WINEPREFIX and leave it alone. Nuance recommends un-installing the software with an active internet connection before upgrading. This is supposed to prevent the activation count from incrementing. The "active internet connection" seems to require the optional winbind (samba-winbind) package available through your distro. If the license loss continues after un-installation, bug report it. http://nuance.custhelp.com