Which Headset Should I Use with Dragon Naturally Speaking?

Nuance seems to always be discounting Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) in November each year, probably in advance of the latest version coming out in December or right after the 1st of the year. Therefore many clients consider improving their ability to create documents and all the other promises of voice recognition.

The headset that comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking is known to be crap by Nuance and others. Technically there are 2 chips used in most wired USB headsets (using the builtin connectors is a strain on the PC, although the newer computers may be able to handle it). The cost to manufacture is about 3-5 cents difference, so you can not tell by price which model is using which, and even a single brand line (such as logitech) will use both. But at $20-50 you can almost by 2 or 3, and return the ones that don’t work well.

I could not tell you why Nuance, the latest owner of DNS chooses to set so many potential customers with bad equipment that will hate voice recognition for years to come, and especially DNS, but they do. Perhaps they really do want to work only with resellers that know the dirty secret, or they want to keep expectations low for another 5-10 years. But the strategy sure seems counter intuitive.

Regardless, now that DNS is so relatively inexpensive, and decent headsets are as well, consider finishing the tool kit and purchase a decent USB or bluetooth headset before installing Dragon Naturally Speaking.

There are some inherent limitations to bluetooth, but they still work well. I researched which was best, and in talking to the engineer who actually worked on the Drgaon Naturally Speaking (DNS) recommended (even though he does not sell it) the Parrot VXi Xpressway last year when I bought mine.

DNS will create a different profile for each headset (since they are sound ‘different’ to the software), so switching does have the challenge of making a vs. b vs. c comparison a little more challenging (but better then training with mic x and then testing with mic y).

Hope this technical interlude helps.

Computer Challenge – How to Create a Bootable Disk?

From Oren S./M/Newington,CT)
Whats the best way to create a bootable disk?

It depends on version of OS that you want to create the bootable disk.  UBCD from Download.com (a CBS (the TV conglomerate) site of shareware programs that are pre-checked for virus’ and malware) is a good tool. UBCD (short for Ultimate Boot CD/Compact Disc) is a program that allows you to create and load a few programs to create a bootable CD.

• Start Menu|Run|CMD|Format a:/sys if you still have a 3.5 diskette.
  

There are other tools built into MS Vista and I believe MS Win7, but I am not as familiar with them. You can also use UBCD to create a bootable thumbdrive or flash drive if you can have your PC boot from USB port. Otherwise the install disks that may have come with your PC as operating system may work to be able to boot directly from a CD.