Topic by Jim Dodds
So here's the deal. I'm an editor. I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12.5 on Windows 10 64-bit Home and Microsoft Word 2007 to do my edits using the Markup functions. What this means is it that I load a 100 page Word document and also load WordPad, for my comments file, and a small timekeeping utility. I've learned to load Dragon first, and then Word, after Dragon is finished loading.
I then read through the document and make changes as I go along. What has been happening is that all this works fine for maybe 10 minutes and then it all goes to ***. It seems to respond the worst when I'm trying to put a new comment into the area on the right-hand side of the word file reserved for that sort of thing. That's when Dragon chokes on itself. Word puts up a bulletin that says not responding, so I turn the microphone off, and then it won't turn back on again, nor will Dragon close. I have to activate the Task Manager to turn Dragon off and I usually have to start word again as well.
I discovered a comment in this forum that suggested turning off the voice commands for other programs, which I've done, and that seems to help. Dragon seems to be more stable this way, and I don't much care about the voice commands. I can do that with Cortana, and I wonder actually if Dragon has conflicts with the underlying voice recognition parts of Windows. Nuance? At any rate this is better, but there are still several stumbles. When I try to dictate into the comment box everything still freezes up and I've also noticed that drag-and-drop function in Microsoft Word stops working.
I would think Nuance would be pretty embarrassed by now with the plethora of negative comments. I would ask the corporation to please post a response to mine and everyone else's questions, which would give us some detailed suggestions about memory usage and what parts of the program tend to use so many resources that working on a large Microsoft Word file becomes completely impractical. Also it would be nice to know why trying to dictate into the comments box when using the markup function basically causes the whole thing to crash.
Thanks to everyone, and to Nuance, for this peculiar, fascinating, frustrating, wonderful program.
Jim Dodds - jemd@wcvt.com - NOW-TODAY-9/15/2015