[Issue] Dragon naturally speaking

[shn70]

Hi,

Do any of you have experience using Dragon naturally speaking with open office? Especially writer, but any of the apps.

Thanks,

Stephen

[Villeroy]

Type the word Dragon into the search box you see in the top-right corner and hit the enter key.

[shn70]

Not much under "dragon" but more than I got under "dragon naturally speaking" .

The only answer there was for another product running under linux and the implication that Dragon is a windows only application and thus may work with open office, but not real cogent to my question.

Danke

[Villeroy]

"Dragon" in http://www.oooforum.org/forum/search.phtml gives more thatn 30 results.
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic ... ght=dragon

The issue is always the same: It is not OOo's obligation to support any tool that wants to dump it's output. It is always the obligation of the data generating program to pass over it's output to one program or the other. There are thousands of programs that can use installed MS Office software to generate reports in Word, Excel or something. They all support MS Office. Microsoft does not do anything to support those 3rd party programs. It works exactly the other way round.

[shn70]

Thanks for the URLs on Dragon. I appreciate your sending them. Stephen

[donbott]

Post by Villeroy on Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:18 pm
"Dragon" in http://www.oooforum.org/forum/search.phtml gives more thatn 30 results.
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic ... ght=dragon

The issue is always the same: It is not OOo's obligation to support any tool that wants to dump it's output. It is always the obligation of the data generating program to pass over it's output to one program or the other. There are thousands of programs that can use installed MS Office software to generate reports in Word, Excel or something. They all support MS Office. Microsoft does not do anything to support those 3rd party programs. It works exactly the other way round.
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This is not precisely correct. There is an excellent discussion on KnowBrainer.com forum at http://www.knowbrainer.com/PubForum/ind ... hread20192 that clarifies the support of SAPI (Speech API) in software. The fact is, OOo does not support SAPI and it should. If it did, then there would be far fewer issues with using DNS. A partial quote -- "Open Office is not Select-and-Say compliant/compatible.... One of the basic aspects of Select-and-Say involves SAPI 4 (Speech Application Program Interface). DNS does not communicate directly with applications. It does so through two SAPI DLLs, one for dictation and one for commands."

So, get OOo supporting SAPI and thereby Select-and-Say and those of us with typing issues would be a lot better off.

[TheGurkha]

@donbott: We're not the developers, just users trying to help to other users.

You can make suggestions or report bugs as described here: [Tutorial] Reporting bugs or suggestions.

[Hagar Delest]

Just for the record, as this problem just popped up today: Issue 71542 - Compatibility with Nuance/Dragon Naturally Speaking.

[acknak]

... The fact is, OOo does not support SAPI and it should. If it did, then there would be far fewer issues with using DNS. A partial quote -- "Open Office is not Select-and-Say compliant/compatible.... One of the basic aspects of Select-and-Say involves SAPI 4 (Speech Application Program Interface). DNS does not communicate directly with applications. It does so through two SAPI DLLs, one for dictation and one for commands."

All well and good; however, OOo is a cross-platform application, and has (I believe, although I can't give a reference) a commitment to using open standards and maintaining platform equality: all features shipped in OOo should work equally well on all supported platforms.

If I'm right and that is the policy, then SAPI may not be appropriate for OOo because it is purely a WIndows API. Many so-called standards that Microsoft creates and promotes have the curious side-effect of making developers, vendors and users just that much more dependent on Microsoft, Windows and Office. I can't say for sure about SAPI, but a glance at the Wikipedia page strongly suggests to me that it's the same old story.

That's not to say that SAPI support in OOo would be a bad thing, or that someone can't write an SAPI extension for OOo that Windows users could choose to install, only that SAPI doesn't really solve the problem for a cross-platform project like OOo, and if it does get supported, I doubt it would be through the efforts of the OO.org developers.

I would watch the issue that Hagar linked to: maybe the OOo developers will look into it and give some official response.