Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too

Just the other day, I was looking for a book on Amazon.com and I saw the announcement for the new Amazon Kindle. It turns out that one of the exciting new features of the Kindle is its ability to read books out loud to you using Nuance RealSpeak text to speech technology. Being an "insider", I knew that this capability was coming soon, but it was a good reminder to me that many people don't realize that Dragon has the capability to read text aloud using the same RealSpeak technology (this capability is available in the Preferred, Professional, Legal and Medical Editions of Dragon).

This feature is especially handy if you are proofreading a document that you have created using Dragon. If you are a Dragon user, you can try this out by selecting some text and saying "read that". If you want to get fancy, can also use any of the following commands: "read line", "read paragraph", "read document", "read window", "read up to here", "read down from here".  We often hear from dyslexic users that this text-to-speech capability is an invaluable tool for proofreading.

Dragon's speaking skills don't stop there -- along with the text to speech capability, Dragon can also play back your voice using the same commands above (except substituting "read" with "play back"). By playing back your own voice, you get a renewed appreciation for the sophistication of the Dragon speech recognition capabilities. You don't often get a chance to hear yourself speak, and the results are often surprising.

This playback capability is especially useful when you are correcting documents. If you created the document yourself and left the correction for later, you can save the audio along with a document and playback in a later date. I use that approach sometimes when I want to quickly dictate a draft of the document and correct it later. Playing back your voice reminds you exactly what you said, which can be useful when you are trying to interpret your dictation later.  This capability is especially helpful if you are using a digital voice recorder or if someone else is correcting your dictation.

Peter

 

Posted 02-13-2009 1:20 PM by dragonstories2010
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Comments

dffd wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 02-21-2009 11:12 AM

are you going to offer any additional voices for the text-to-speech? Also will you be adding better support for Bluetooth headsets, so you can have Dragon playback it's audio straight to the Bluetooth headset?

dragonstories2010 wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 02-21-2009 11:38 AM

Thanks for your feedback!  If you have a request for a new feature, please submit it via our feature request form at:

www.nuance.com/.../feature-request.asp

To answer your Bluetooth question - we support playback via Bluetooth headset today.  In your Windows control panel, you can adjust your audio settings to control which device is used for audio recording and playback separately.  I use the Plantronics Calisto headset and it works well for audio playback.

I hope that helps

Peter

James wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 02-27-2009 9:15 PM

Peter,

How can I get me hands on the professional version?

I'd like to be able to save the voice with the text and as far as I can tell this feature is not available on my preferred dragon 10 license.

Please advise, enjoyed the article!

-James

dragonstories2010 wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 02-27-2009 10:11 PM

The Preferred version supports TTS and also stores your recorded voice.  To make sure you are storing recordings, go to Tools>Options and select the Data tab.  There is an option there for saving recorded dication with documents.

To test it, you can select some text that you dictated and select the Sound menu and then Play That Back.  Make sure your audio is turned up and you should hear your voice.

I hope that helps

Dragoner wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 03-14-2009 12:25 PM

Peter,

to the best of my knowledge, the ability to save audio along with the document is only available in the higher versions (Pro and up), but not in Preferred.

It has been this way since 8 at least and still is so in 10.

The option you are refering to in the Data tab under "Tools - Options"  is called "Save dictation with document", and it is set to "Ask me" by default. You can change it to either "Never" or "Always", or just keep it this way.

If you do so, any time you dictate into DragonPad, MS Word, or Notepad, but not in WordPad, you will be prompted when either closing out of the document or when saving the document in the editor, if you want to save the dictation also, reminding you that a lot of disk space will be consumed if you do.

If you choose to save the audio, another file with the extension .dra according to the document's file name will be created in the same folder.

Since these files are very large, depending on the length of the document, you should check from time to time and delete them, if you don't need them anymore.

DRA files can be opened also in DragonPad, by setting the "File Type" list to .dra files, while in the Open file dialogue.

Hope this helps

Dragoner

James wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 03-16-2009 2:01 AM

Dragoner,

Thanks for the post!  I can't figure out how to save the voice file (.dra) with the preferred version.

Sounds like I need to take the next step up the ladder.

I've submitted to the CS section & not received a response.  Any tips on how to get access to the professional version?

-James

Diego wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 05-08-2009 6:44 AM

Hi Peter,

Congratulations for your article, i was just wondering how Kindle have implemented TTS functionality, and you help me a lot. Does Nuance offer any ASR/TTS optimized for embedded system (kindle 2 is based on ARM)?

Thank you a lot!

Diego

Jim wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 07-14-2009 10:52 AM

I have the preferred version and would also like to save the audio recording with the document. I tried what you said in your last response, but that option is not shown under the data tab in the preferred 10 I have. Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Jim

Jas wrote re: Dragon Doesn't Just Listen, It Speaks Too
on 11-05-2010 6:25 PM

Hi, thanks for the article. Does Dragon read aloud text that you have not dictated, such as websites? I seem to remember an earlier version would read my emails but I am not able to find how to make the current edition do this.

Jas

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