13 July 2011

I cannot believe that I spent the best part of the morning on the telephone to the Dragon voice activation people, YET AGAIN! This must be my fourth or fifth session with these technicians. Basically, the problem with this latest version of Dragon which, I recently installed, is that it treats my commands as text. In other words if I say ”full stop’ sometimes I it put those words in the text rather than the full stop at the end of a sentence. Similarly, when I want the microphone to switch off and say’ stop listening’ I can get those words in the text rather than the microphone going to sleep.

I have been using the Dragon voice activation system from the first day it came out in Version 1, something like 20 years ago and although the early versions were not very accurate I still thought they were pretty miraculous now. We are up up to Version 11 which I recently and updated from Premium to the Professional at a cost (to the MND Association) £437.

 

So, I am sure that you can understand my frustration when I say that this one works less satisfactoryly than theprevious version 10. The technicians I had been dealing with has shown the utmost patience in trying to get to the root of the problem by trawling through the various Dragon menus, tweaking them here and there and, in desperation, today, installing a new user with me having to train the thing all over again, and it is still not right. As a result I have yet another session, with Sayana, the technician on my case, on Friday morning, in order to report on whether the new user is any better than the original one (so far, it isn’t!)

What is so embarrassing about this whole process is that I have always been a strong advocate of this voice activation programme, for many years, and persuaded a number of friends to purchase it. I just pray that they do not experience the same frustration as I am at present as I should feel very guilty