Dear Ifeffit users, I have begun using Dragon NaturallySpeaking with programs such as Ifeffit and specifically Athena and Artemis. Due to strain/decay of the tendons of my wrists I have been trying to type less. I have had mixed success with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I am using Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional which has a large vocabulary and allows for scripting. There are times when the dictation works very well, and times when it does not work at all. I assume that as I train at it it will get better. One of the key things is that you have to know what you want to type before you type. And it works much better if you can simply talk and say a complete sentence without any pauses. My problem is that I don't always know what I'm saying even as I am saying it :-) Using the program is as much self training how to talk to a machine as it is training the machine how to understand you. Dragon NaturallySpeaking has two basic modes. Dictation mode, which I'm using to dictate this letter, simply writes whatever you say directly into the application. In this mode the program is replacing the keyboard. Command mode on the other hand, sends particular keystrokes with a verbal command. For example if I say the command "file", the file menu will be activated. I can then select the desired option. In this case Dragon NaturallySpeaking is simply sending the keys "alt+f" to the application. By writing scripts I can create commands to send whatever key combination I wish. These can be quite simple as above or complex. Athena and Artemis are quite mouse intensive. But I have begun making scripts for some of the most common commands that I use. For example, open and close project. I have also created scripts to click on the graphing keys. I don't think there are shortcut keys for these functions (?) so I had to be more creative. By using a mouse capture function to get mouse position, I could create a script to move the mouse over a button and click it. For example the command "current E" moves the mouse over the button E under the 'plot current group in' section and clicks it. So far scripting this way seems to work quite well. The difficulty arises with correction. As you dictate mistakes are made. This may be because Dragon NaturallySpeaking misunderstands you, or you have spoken word that is not in its vocabulary. It is important to correct Dragon NaturallySpeaking in order for it to learn how you speak and learn new words. This is typically done by using the "correct that" command. This brings up a dialog window which you can then use to enter the word that you meant. Once you select the word that you want then the program corrects the word in the application. However, this does not work very well with many applications including Athena and Artemis. This appears to be a failing of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Its correction feature works very well with the included DragonPad application and mostly well with Microsoft Word but other applications are hit or miss. One of the difficulties is non-standard shortcut keys. For example, if in the application control-c does something other than copy. In this case it is necessary to write a script specifically for that application which overrides what the "copy that" function does. If anyone has any interest in using Dragon with Athena and Artemis or any other application, I would be happy to help them as I can. Or just to talk about program. I'm just learning the program myself and there is very little official support for scripting. Cheers, Adam ------------------------------------------------------ M Adam Webb Alberta Synchrotron Institute (http://www.asi-cls.ca/) 8308 - 114 Street, Suite 2080 Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E1, Canada Phone: (780)492-5464 Fax: (780)492-6160 Email: adam.webb@asi-cls.ca