Dragon NaturallySpeaking

[Bryan Crow]

I just joined your forum. Shoo me away if I've come to the wrong place. I don't play computer games, because I'd love them too much. But I'm just as hungry for computer capability as any gamer. I do some video and audio editing, and I work with AutoCADand other demanding applications. The application I use every day, though, that seriously challenges a computer is the latest version of ScanSoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

I don't know much about computers, but last summer I put together a system based on Athlon’s 64-bit processor, a 3400+, on a Gigabyte motherboard. It seemed blazingly fast when I started using it. Text transcribed by NaturallySpeaking 7 popped up on the screen almost as fast as I could dictate, but the latest version runs a lot more slowly. Version 8 has proven considerably more accurate than previous versions, but its display lags. The consensus among the folks in the know is that slower processing is unavoidable—the price you pay for the improved accuracy. The only way to get Version 8 to display as fast as Version 7, it seems, would be to step up to to a more powerful computer.

I guess that shouldn't surprise us. Speech-recognition experts have said all along that the future of speech-recognition software depends to a large extent on brute computer power. I'm hoping some of you use DNS and that you'll comment on this assumption.

More important, I hope you can tell me how to modify or tune my computer for a significant speed boost—not just for DNS, but for other tasks that eat up processor time. DNS eats RAM too. It takes as much as a gigabyte just to keep it open with the mic on—along with everything running in the background. That's true even when you're not dictating. Unless you advise me not to, I'm going to add another gigabyte of RAM.

I'm also strongly considering springing for the new 4000+. Do you think that would yield a noticeable boost? Should I overclock it? I notice that one reviewer had no problem running the 4000+ at 2.72 GHz.

For that matter, maybe the 3400+ I already have would speed up DNS recognition if I overclocked it. The Gigabyte motherboard came with software for overclocking from Windows XP, but I haven't tried it.

A 4000+ CPU plus a pair of 1 GB DIMMs would cost $1300. I wouldn't hesitate to pay that much to get DNS to work fast again. Not that it's terribly slow, but with Version 7, you couldn't dictate fast enough to outrun the software. Now it correctly recognizes more things you say but often lags behind.

I've read several of the articles this forum recommends, and I'll continue to educate myself about overclocking. Still, I hope some of you will advise me. How can I come up with a computer that will run Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 as fast as DNS 7? I hope I can hold onto this almost-new motherboard. It had just came on the market when I bought it in June 2004. I'd have to check the model number.

Bryan Crow
Tennessee

[redcap]

sounds like its a processor intensive program. id say the 1GB of ram should be enough for it. what would deffinitely improve the performance of the system is overclocking it. when u overclock ur processor ur also overclocking your ram so even though u still only have 1GB of ram, its running at a much faster speed and can access the information faster. if you wouldnt mind posting what kind of ram you have along with the speed of the ram (ie. PC3200, PC3500... or DDR400 DDR 500, whatever u know about it) we can give u some more info.

in terms of overclocking, poke around through the BIOS as well and read the manual that came with your motherboard so that you know where all of the important OCing settings are. im no expert on OCing AMDs as i have an Intel system, but its basically the same idea for both. Increase the FSB slowly in 2-5mhz increments untill you cant boot into windows. when this happens you back it down a bit to make it stable and check for stability.

you also may need to consider things such as cooling your cpu and case. good airflow in the case is key and a good heatsink on the processor is very important. the 4000+ and an extra gig of ram would definitely give u more performance but it would cost you. why not pay a lil for cooling (100 bucks max) and maybe if ur ram is not up for the OC 1gig of new OCing ram.

full system specs are important for us to help you more tho. post ram type/speed, your current case and cpu cooling, and your power supply. also, is that a S754 mobo or S939?

[davidhammock200]

What are your system specs?

I'm sure that we can help you to speed that sucker up!

[bmxfelon420]

id say if you can afford it, go with the part that can be overclocked to be the best, not nessasarily the fastest stock. I mean, if you have that much money to spend, before it could even begin to fail, you would need to upgrade. I suggest reading one of our many overclocking guides and going from there. If you have any specific questions that you dont feel are answered anywhere else, feel free to give any one of the moderators a private message, im, or even email. I would be glad to help

[Bryan Crow]

Thanks for getting back so fast, redcap. You're already telling me stuff I didn't know. I should've realized overclocking speeds up RAM, for example, but it hadn't occurred to me. I have three 512 MB sticks of 400 MHz DDR PC 3200. I've been thinking about replacing two of them with 1 GB DIMMs.

By the way, it's not that I'm rich; it's because I work with my computer and interface with it more and more by voice that justifies the investment. This new speech-recognition program makes far fewer errors than earlier versions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. That saves a lot of time and speeds up my work. I like your idea. If I can get the performance I need out of the 3400+ CPU and the 1536 MB of RAM I already have, I'd rather not spend that kind of money.

I installed oversized fans—five of them—when I assembled this machine from a bare-bones kit. Yeah, the CPU would melt down without one, there's one for the power supply, one for the case, and one for each of two hard drives. PC Boost warns me that the "System Fan" isn't spinning. At other times it says the "Power Fan" isn't on. I'll need to drag out the literature that came with the equipment to be sure, but I think those fans aren't supposed to kick in as long as the temperature stays down around 54°C, which it does. I guess that still might not be enough cooling, and we'd want to be sure those buggers will switch on if I notch up the clock speed.

Another thing you say surprised me. I didn't realize that it was safe to crank up the FSB in 2-5 MHz increments until the system won't boot. Once I can't boot, I'd have to go into the BIOS to throttle back, but I don't have to go into the BIOS to speed up the clock. I've installed software that came with the motherboard that lets you tinker with the settings from Windows XP. I've just been scared to touch them.

This is a 939-pin nForce Gigabyte mobo with RAID and SATA capabilities. I've even wondered about a striped array, but I worry that Dragon NaturallySpeaking needs write speed more than read speed. It may be telling that frequent defragmentation with Diskeeper Pro helps the "Dragon" to work faster. It's not uncommon for me to defragment the 120 GB 6Y120L0 Maxtor hard drive every hour! DNS definitely runs more smoothly after defragmentation.

By the way, this thing has a 128 kB primary memory cache and a 1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache, and Belarc Adviser says the bus clock is running at 200 MHz. Now, this will sound strange, but I'm pretty sure it sometimes shows 220 MHz, even though I never touch the settings. Then I might just be remembering wrong.

BC

[Bryan Crow]

Thanks for the encouragement, A64 OverClocker. You folks are making me think I've come to the right place. Check out the specs, please, that I listed for redcap and tell me what else you'd like to know.

Bryan

[eneuman]

have you checked to see that there aren't other processes running that are slowing down your system? see: spyware, unnessesary services.

minimun specs for DNS:
* Intel ® Pentium ® III / 500 MHz processor (or equivalent AMD® processor)
* 256 MB RAM
* 500 MB free hard disk space
* Microsoft ® Windows ® XP (SP1 or higher) Home and Professional, Millennium, 2000 (SP4 or higher)
* Creative ® Sound Blaster ® 16 or equivalent sound card supporting 16-bit recording
* Microsoft ® Internet Explorer 5 or higher (free download available at www.microsoft.com)
* CD-ROM drive (required for installation)
* ScanSoft-approved n oise-canceling headset microphone (included)
* Speakers (required for playback of recorded speech and text-to-speech features)
* A Web connection is required for activation

something must be wrong with your system if it has trouble handling an app that only needs this to run.

[Gh3tt0PC]

Another thing you say surprised me. I didn't realize that it was safe to crank up the FSB in 2-5 MHz increments until the system won't boot. Once I can't boot, I'd have to go into the BIOS to throttle back, but I don't have to go into the BIOS to speed up the clock. I've installed software that came with the motherboard that lets you tinker with the settings from Windows XP. I've just been scared to touch them.

Yep, this is a great way to gain a little extra power for free...an overall system boost like FSB overclocking could make a noticable difference in DNS. Have you tried defragmenting the hard drive lately? It amazes me how many people overlook something this simple that can increase the performance of their computer drastically. I recommend a good defrag program like O&O Defrag.

EDIT: after looking at scansoft's website, I realized that DNS uses a whopping 500mb of harddrive space...this amount of files could easily be fragmented and disorganized on your harddrive, which leads me to further recommend a good defrag program.

[Bryan Crow]

bmxfelon420:

I'm not one of those guys who has to drive a Ferrari to the supermarket, and especially not because my next-door neighbor is driving a Corvette. My need for speed is purely practical. As I explained to redcap, the only reason I can afford to invest in computer stuff is that increased speech-recognition accuracy and speed pays for it.

I guess everybody's heard of overclocking, and while the idea has always intrigued me, I never thought I'd be interested in it until this new ScanSoft software proved slower than Version 7 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I'm going to follow your advice and read up on the basics. At least then I'll know what you guys are talking about when I come to you for help.

Thanks for your suggestions. I appreciate your willingness to help on an individual basis, and I'll be coming to you.

Bryan

[amilian]

Brian,

Welcome to the forum. You've come to the right place and I'm sure we can help you.

I use VR extensively every day, and definately can offer some helpful advice.

I've used Dragon NaturallySpeaking for several years now and enjoy 99% accuracy and wicked fast response times. Getting to this point has been through much trial and error and tweaking and experimenting. I dictate and correct as I go so low latency between the time I talk and the time the words appear is important to me. In short, I've managed to get the latency down as fast as is possible with my box (see sig), and curiously, it's not through raw CPU power or insane memory bandwidth. Believe it or not, the most important factor with VR and a PC is the I/O bottleneck between your memory and your hard drive.

There are 2 solutions for you; hardware and software.

The hardware solution (first cheapest and then most expensive) is to get RAID0 which will definately help, but if you want the BEST solution - the bomb - you want an ultra320 scsi drive (single drive and single channel controller is fine although raid0 with two scsi's is even better albeit very expensive). No question here at all. I know geeks that have used VR for years and are convinced of the performance increases with VR using scsi's, so don't listen to arguments against them. But importantly is that there is a software solution that equals (some argue even beats) the low latencies offered by scsi drives. I've not used scsi's so I don't know. But I've used a great software caching solution described next and it's awesome, and this is what I'd recommend you try first.

The software solution to beat the I/O bottleneck with your hard drive is with a great program called supercache, which is a multi-threaded device driver designed to improve the disk I/O performance of a system by using free physical memory as a disk cache. Both NTFS and FAT partitions are supported.( http://www.superspeed.com/supercache.html and http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/supercache.php and actual I/O improvement here http://www.superspeed.com/perdat.html), Free trial here http://www.superspeed.com/download/trialversions.php
white paper here http://www.necsam.com/servers/whitep...rspeedWPv2.pdf

Brian, it might sound like a commercial, but this software boasts Super Performance for Dragon NaturallySpeaking on AMD Windows systems, and the program delivers! By the way, I am not affiliated with superspeed in any way. There are other ramdisk programs out there that I've tried and they are good too. Google ramdisk and you should find ones like Cenetek ramdisk that work well. I've actually used the Cenetek one to put my pagefile on a ramdisk and the performance improvements are great. But as far as VR goes, supercacheNT is the one to go for, which includes a supercache tuning engine which allows you to set the size of the cache pagesize (different than windows pagesize) which makes a huge difference in performance. I only have 512mb ram, and use a windows page file of 1024mb on a second drive, and a supercache performance c: partition with a supercache pagesize of only 130MB, which caches all my programs, in fact, my entire c: with windows and everything. I'm intending to get 1gb setup soon so I can increase this 130 size, so I'd recommend you go for 1Gb (2x512mb run in dual channel on 939 board)

Other things you should probably already know is in the Dragon program itself (tools options misc tab), there's the slider bar for performance/accuracy. If you haven't tried it, slide it to the left for faster response times.

Hope that helps.

[onewecallgod]

tweak XP does ramdisk too

[jbmcmillan]

Also don't use the software for overclocking do it from the bios only.Software overclocking if it is the same as Gigabytes Easytune is buggy and does not work very well.

[davidhammock200]

Please provide the following information:

case

power supply

case cooling fan arrangement

CPU heatsink & fan

motherboard

CPU

RAM

video card

sound card

any other PCI cards

hard disk drives

floppy disk drives

optical drives

any other drives

operating system version

software (all, full details please)

case temp from BIOS

CPU temp from BIOS

+3.3V / +5V / +12V / from BIOS

And anything else you can think of.

[Bryan Crow]

Hello, eneuman. I replied to you last night or very early this morning, but I don't see the post now. Maybe I didn't send it properly, or maybe we're not supposed to make comments about people's entertaining pictures. Maybe the post got banned. I read the forum rules, and I intend to abide by them, but maybe I'd better reread them.

After eight years, even after the advent of Windows XP, I endured frequent irredeemable crashes. I was rarely able to work two months without suffering breakdowns that no one in our city or on the Web could get me out of. I learned more about computers than I'd ever intended to, andreformatting my hard drives and reinstalling Windows XP from scratch got to be a regular routine.

In April 2004. I installed Norton Ghost to back up the hard drives. I also installed Norton Utilities, Registry Mechanic, Diskeeper Pro 9.0, PC Boost, PestPatrol and other maintenance software. These gizmos work, don't they?

Since then, I haven't had a single serious crash, nothing that couldn't be easily fixed. I run all these programs (except PestPatrol) every day, along with chkdsk. I stopped running PestPatrol so often, because after cleaning out a lot of spyware, I find that it's rare for anybody to sneak any past me. I run Diskeeper Pro as often as every hour if I'm dictating continuously or editing audio or video.

Yes, my system far exceeds the minimum specs for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I've inadvertently misled you. I don't think it's accurate to say the system has trouble handling DNS. I use it to compose everything I send to this forum, for example, and this new version is by far the most accurate. The latency of the display, the lag between my utterances and words popping up on the screen shortened dramatically after I put this computer together. The display was almost instantaneous, but that was with Version 7 of DNS. When the new version came out last fall, it proved to be the biggest improvement ever. It recognizes most things you say correctly, but the price is a slowdown in performance. Members of two speech-recognition forums I belong to have reached the consensus that longer latencies are just in the nature of the beast. the thinking is that faster hardware is the only way to get back to those near-instantaneous displays we enjoyed with Version 7.

But don't get me wrong, enueman. I'm not talking about latencies of several seconds or of minutes. The lag, however, is enough to make proofing as you go a little slower. sometimes, you have to wait a second or so to see everything you've just said.

This is still an exceptionally competent application. I've owned every version of DNS. It began as little more than a novelty to toy with. I'd use it for a while and then go back to manual typing. By Version 5 DNS had become a serious tool, and Versions 6 and 7 represented the biggest leaps forward ever—until Version 8.

Unless you're a fantastic stenographer or have some speech impediment, or you're simply unwilling to speak carefully (though perfectly naturally), I'd expect you to find yourself able to compose text more easily, more rapidly, with fewer mistakes using this software then you could using a manual keyboard.

I think the Holy Grail for speech recognition would be software able to "understand" spoken language as well as a human listener. By that, I mean no training or dictation skill should be necessary. For now, it remains necessary to train the software before you start using it, but the training required by Version 8 is minimal. In well under an hour from the time you install Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8, you can dictate to it to produce text. Lots of people achieve over 99% accuracy, but remember that even an error rate as low as half a percent will mean several mistakes per page that you'll have to correct. But then manual typing produces errors too. The only way you can misspell with Dragon NaturallySpeaking is by coming up with the wrong word or phrase—phase for Faye's, to for two, youth in Asia for euthanasia.

I usually can't think fast enough to dictate too fast for the program. With the advent of Version 8, however, if I start reading rapidly but distinctly from a magazine, I'll look up at the screen after a paragraph or two and find the display running pretty far behind. That was impossible on this computer with Version 7. Without sacrificing the newfound accuracy of Version 8, I'd like to be able to achieve such short latencies again. It's really useful when you're dictating something simple that you don't have to stop and think about, and it obviously it would be necessary if you plug in recordings from dictation equipment such as many telephones and MP3 players include.

I meant only to make good-natured comments about your photograph. It amused me, reminded me of myself when I was 19. Aren't we allowed to make personal asides? I'll read the forum rules more closely.

[onewecallgod]

Originally Posted by davidhammock200

Please provide the following information

thats all irrelevant information....

anyways, it seems (to me) that accuracy slowdown is more of a software than a hardware thing seeing as how you already have a blazing fast system and the requirements for this program are quite low. like someone said above, the only thing you can really improve is the disk read/write times, everything else is already very fast. try going RAID 0 with dual 74gb Western Digital Raptors or some sort of SCSI array. that might help the most

[davidhammock200]

Originally Posted by onewecallgod

thats all irrelevant information....

anyways, it seems (to me) that accuracy slowdown is more of a software than a hardware thing seeing as how you already have a blazing fast system and the requirements for this program are quite low. like someone said above, the only thing you can really improve is the disk read/write times, everything else is already very fast. try going RAID 0 with dual 74gb Western Digital Raptors or some sort of SCSI array. that might help the most

Yea, you right, we don't need to know the mobo or RAM or anything.

[onewecallgod]

Originally Posted by davidhammock200

Yea, you right, we don't need to know the mobo or RAM or anything.

if you have eyes and know how to read, you can clearly see that he already has posted the details of the core components. case, cd drive, PSU...etc are irrelevant

[davidhammock200]

Originally Posted by onewecallgod

if you have eyes and know how to read, you can clearly see that he already has posted the details of the core components. case, cd drive, PSU...etc are irrelevant

Why are you in such a bad mood today?

[Bryan Crow]

Thanks, amilian. Thanks a million. This is pure gold—advice from a computer whiz who's also a DNS user. I love it that you're enjoying "wicked fast response times." That's what I want. Since you're familiar with the software, I'll reveal this detail. Version 8 will pop my words up on the screen just as fast as Version 7 if I dictate into DragonPad or establish a brand new user, a user without my idiosyncratic vocabulary and extensive voice files going back to Version 5. With a new user, I get blazing speed and even acceptable accuracy—as long as I keep it simple. But the world's not simple, so if you want to talk about some things, you're going to end up with some fifty-cent words and some complex sentence structure, right?

I'm continuously trying to improve the way I use DNS, but I've come to this forum looking for ways to meet some of the challenges with hardware. I'm like the coach builder who designed a body for one of Enzo Ferrari’s cars. The shape was gorgeous but it had a high coefficient of drag. The stylist said to il Commendatore, "It's too beautiful to change it just to make it more streamlined. Put a bigger engine in it." Like the car stylist, I don't want to finesse Dragon NaturallySpeaking, I want to give the Dragon the horsepower to blow past the sticking points.

I came to the right place. This is the first time I've heard the bottleneck identified, the I/O bottleneck between memory and hard drive. And you give me not just one but two ways to circumvent it. I may start with RAID0, because this motherboard came with SATA capabilities and also a RAID controller. I need a new drive anyway, so I'm quite willing to invest in an ultra320 SCSI drive and maybe even two of them. Mirrored or striped? Will you please recommend specific hardware and give me just the gist of how it should be set up?

But I'm getting ahead of myself, huh? I've never heard of SuperCache, so I'm reading the pages you sent me links to. I'm especially eager to read the white paper, but all of these pages are chock-full of stuff I don't know. You insinuate that if I had a ton of RAM and one or two SCSI drives, caching hardware might not be needed or even get used. True? Can fancy hardware still profit from software like this? The SuperSpeed software costs $108, and I see I can try it free. I'll certainly do that before spending money on hardware that might not be necessary.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking has by far the most pressing need for breaking the bottleneck, but I have other needs for a faster processor. Some format conversions and other kinds of treatments that I do with audio and video converters take a lot of time, and you know how long it takes to run the Dragon's Acoustic Optimizer.

I'm not hell-bent on spending money, but I do have another reason for replacing two of the 512 MB DIMMs with 1 GB DIMMs. I have a second tower sitting underneath my desk beside the system I've been talking about. It's connected to our house-wide sound and video system, and my wife and I listen to music and news and Audible.com books from what we call our jukebox computer. I use Cybex SwitchView to make it possible to view and control the two computers with a single monitor and keyboard (I do use separate mice to help remember which computer you're working in). Like the other computers in our house, they're on a household LAN, so I pass lots of data between them. For example, I used a faster computer to convert the formats of a lot of material we played on the "jukebox."

I only have 512 MB of RAM in the jukebox, and other tasks I use it for our starting to interrupt because of lack of memory. I stole one of the 512 MB sticks in the Gigabyte motherboard computer from the jukebox in the first place, so if I replaced one or two of those DIMMs with 1024 MB DIMMs, I'd be giving myself some leeway on both machines.

I retired recently, but I continue to do AutoCAD drawing and technical writing for people. The more capable my computer, the more money I can make. So advise me, amalian. I'm not bound and determined to buy hardware, and if I gave you a budget or a limit of $1500, would you just try to get by with SuperSpeed, or would you buy SCSI drives? Knowing that I use the computer for other tasks but that Dragon NaturallySpeaking is far and away the most important application to speed up, what could you do with $500 to $1500?

I know this gigabyte motherboard is capable of running duel-channel RAM. I seem to remember reading in the user's manual that it automatically finds DIMMs in its slots and uses them in the most optimal way. But does that guarantee the RAM is in two channels? You recommend two DIMMs of 512 MB each running dual channel on my 939-pin board. Must you restrict yourself to two DIMMs to take advantage of the mobo's dual-channel capability? What's going on with that third stick of memory? You say you're going to step up to 1 GB yourself, so I get the idea it wouldn't hurt to install more memory. What drawbacks would I face if I stepped up to a pair of 1024 MB DIMMs (since I need at least one of the 512 MB DIMMs for the jukebox anyway)?

Yes, I can force DNS to display faster by sliding the performance/accuracy slider to the left. I've always kept it all the way to the right for maximum accuracy. On this computer, Version 7 ran like an F-16 and that setting. I'm looking for fast response without giving up accuracy. When you slide the bar all the way to the right, you're telling the program, so I'm told, to go through more statistical algorithms to construct a match. If all I ever did was dictate newspaper stories, neither my vocabulary nor my sentence structure would be very fancy, and DNS could produce accurate matches without so much sorting. You may be like some of my friends who use several different users—some with more limited language models than others. It may be a mistake, but I persist in using a single general user.

Your post is chock-full of provocative ideas. Now I not only need to read material about overclocking, I need to read about these applications that use RAM, as I understand it, to emulate hard drives by holding—what—partitions in system memory?

BC

[Bryan Crow]

David, I've put you off till last because you're forcing me to get off my lazy behind to dig up the literature that came with the motherboard. I like what you're saying, and it seems to sum up the consensus—that the system is already fast enough except when it comes to reading from the disk or writing to it. Funny you should mention 74 GB Raptors, because I almost bought a pair last summer. Somebody on one of the speech-recognition forums told me that striping wouldn't help, because what I needed to make Dragon work fast was more computational power. I was a little bit doubtful even at the time. You can hear your hard drive clicking like crazy when you use DNS, and the fact that hourly defragmentation is needed to keep DNS running smoothly is another clue that the hard drive might be involved. You guys have convinced me.

"... some sort of SCSI array... ." What do you recommend?

If you still need the specifications I haven't reported, please let me know.

Thanks.