Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking

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kmcelrath

Bit poster
I already use Parallels and want to purchase Dragon Naturally Speaking so I can plug in a Sony ICD-MX20 Digital Voice Recorder with Removable Memory Stick and produce text from interviews I do.

I'd like to know if any of you have tried this, and what has your experience been? Problems? No problems? Gotchas?
 
Be careful: Dragon NS 9 preferred will run fine on bootcamp but my experience is that you need a Macbook with heaps of grunt to run it effectively on Parallels.

Here's my experience. Until recently I had a Macbook 13", 2.16 Mhz processor and 2 MB ram (purchased mid 2006). This was NOT adequate to run Dragon NS 9 preferred on Parallels. When trying to train it the app just froze up. Whether this was because of lack of processing power or ram I don't know, but you couldn't get any more than 2 MB ram into the 13" or get more than a 2.16 Mhz processor. For some reason I couldn't get the machine to assign more than 904 MB ram to the Virtual Machine and thi sis not enough to run Dragon - you need a minimum of 1Gb RAM. NS ran fine on Bootcamp, but not Parallels.

Last year I got a Macbook Pro 15" with 4 MB RAM and the 2.4 Mhz processor. Still running !0.4.11. Dragon NS 9 preferred runs just fine on Parallels under this setup.

Another word of warning: The Mic input on the Mac will not work with unpowered mikes. Your Mac will default to the built in microphone without you realising it - with variable results. You must get yourself a USB headset (eg Pantronic) for decent results.

Hope this helps.
 
heaps of power

I'm running a 2.33 Ghz Macbook Pro with 3GB of RAM. I'm actually planning on using a Sony digital recorder for input, then having the Macbook read the cards and Dragon interpret the text. I don't think I'll be able to get my client to use a headset, I think the digital recorder will do ok and will be much more convenient. At least I hope so.

On Parallels, I just upgraded to the latest version today. I'm hoping this will help with the RAM allocation issues.
 
You can override the mac os with ram but this can have issues for the mac depending on what you need the mac os to do. Other people have run NS this way but I don't think the results are as good as having >2 g of ram. Anyway with 3g ram you should be fine. Good luck!
 
My 17' MPB first gen 2.16 seems to work just fine running XP with 740MB RAM and DNS 8 Preferred. My problem was getting the audio settings right. Now that this is running smoothly with my iMic I am dictating perfectly in my database.
 
My biggest issue with DNS was not actually memory, but getting the audio settings right. I am able to run Dragon on an XP VM with only 512 MB of RAM, and it runs just fine. The only catch is that Dragon needs to be the __only__ program running in the VM.

I have one copy of XP just for Dragon, and another copy for my other Doze stuff.
 
I am running Dragon naturally speaking on Parallels with Windows 7. Have 8 Ram and it is working. I also have Dragon Dictate on my mac. I want to switch between the Mac and Parallels window 7 mic. How do I do that?

When I open Parallels, I get a window that asks which system I am using for the mic. I need to get to that window.
 
I am also using DNS on Windows 7, but dictating on my iPad Blue Mikey is not heard or working on DNS. What do I need to do? Thanks.
 
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