Dragon naturally speaking into Mac applications with coherence

Moved from "Installation and Configuration in Mac OS"

I have succeeded in using Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 with Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac. It works fine on the VM in the Dragon Pad and Wordpad.

When I run coherence mode and have not opened any word processing applications on the VM, speech appears as a independent box that can be pulled over the Mac desktop. However, if I am in any wordprocessing package for the Mac it doesn't enter that window as text.

HOW CAN I MAKE THIS WORK - IT WOULD MAKE PARALLELS A FABULOUS PROGRAM IF IT ALLOWS DNS TO WORK ON MAC APPLICATIONS. IS THERE SOMETHING I NEED TO TOGGLE ON THE MAC END TO ALLOW THE TEXT TO BE ENTERED INTO THE OPEN MAC APPLICATION.

It is bizarre watching the words float in front of the word processing window of TextEdit and not being able to get it to land!

 

Cutting and pasting DN8 from XP to Mac is self-defeating

I think that Parallels needs to see the importance of having words flow directly from XP into documents on the Mac using the Coherence mode. If you can cut and paste from one to the other, why can't words flow directly? Is the barrier on the Mac end.

 

Coherence mode is a visual illusion. It makes it look like the Windows application is appearing on the OSX desktop by masking the rest of the Windows desktop.

I am not sure if what you are asking can be done. Think of it this way. Place a (real) Windows PC on your desk next to your Mac. Connect them using an ethernet cable. Now make Dragon Naturally Speaking fill up documents on the Mac through the ethernet cable. When you get this working, you should be able to follow the same procedure in Parallels.

 

Visual illusion is a good way of putting it. Clearly, moving from visual illusion to functionality is the next step. You hint this may best be achieved via networking. I don't know enough about networking to know if we virtually networked the VM to the Mac host whether information in the form of text could flow live from the VM to the cursor in the Mac application. I don't know if your side by side model has ever worked. I am not yet willing to give up on this holy grail of connectivity. DNS is not going to support a Mac version any time soon.

Thanks for your insight.


Adam

 

There are ways of getting this working through VNC (and synergy2) but they are hackish at best.

Consider Dragon like another keyboard, except it is inside your VM. This keyboard now has to control your real machine, except for that to happen your real (hardware) keyboard has to be passed to the VM from the real OS, then passed back out...

From this I hope you can see why it does not work all that well....

 

Using VNC / synergy

Can You discribe the method using VNC?