Speech to text program for disabled typers help please

Due to a disability, its extreamly difficult to type for me and I want to be able to communicate in SL since there is no voice capability.

I have Scansoft's Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 8 preferred speech to text program that works wonderfully in documents, e-mails and on forums. It will not work properly in game and drops letters from words or whole words or fights for resources with the client and I must reboot constantly. Corrections can not be made in game and the typing is greatly delayed before showing up on the screen.

I have wireless broad band, a pentium4 2.4 processor, Radeon 9600, and 2 full gig of ram as well as the Dell XPS gamer laptop that even more powerful but still can not get the speech to text to work properly.

Are there any settings I can change or any tweaks you can provide for people to be able to use speech to text programs in game? Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

My first suggestion would be to tweak the priorities of the SL and/or Dragon processes. If you are running NT/2K/XP you can just open the Task Manager, right-click on the secondlife.exe in the Process list and set its priority to BelowNormal (similarly, you could set the Dragon process AboveNormal, but I would hold that option for later). If that turns out to work, there are programs around to automate the priority switch.

If Dragon has an option to increase the delay between keystrokes you might try that. I found a 10ms sleep in my own scripting stuff prevented keystroke drop even when I tried to overload my computer.

I am doing mass transfers of text using the Windows clipboard, which appears to work more reliably than simulating keystrokes. Unfortunately have no idea what the Dragon options are like these days.

Chris

From what you're describing, your internet connection probably isn't the problem, but wireless networking can lead to message wackiness with SL.

Besides that, yes, Minsk's advice is what I'd do.

(I'm assuming that your Pentium 4 is the laptop, right? You don't have two computers?)

Thank you for your responses. I will try the suggestion.

I don't know how to "increase the delay between keystrokes"

Yes, I have 2 pcs. one is the Dell laptop. The other is custom made and is my desktop pc.

The Dell is the new gaming machine that is very powerful and faster than my desktop one.

I will let you know if this works. Sure hope it does. Thanks again.

Got to keep in mind you have two very cpu intensive programs running at the same time and you are likely running out of resources. A duel core CPU would be ideal for your situation and one of the reasons duel core cpu's are the future. Does not help you right now, I know.

I'm not totally sure if this would work, but I'm wondering if it would be possible to run SL on the laptop and NaturallySpeaking on the desktop, then connect the two using an app like Synergy. (Synergy is a network application that allows you to use one mouse and keyboard with multiple computers. You would still be able to use your laptop's mouse/pointing device while talking.)

Getting it set up would not be totally convenient, (though there are instructions on the Synergy site) but if NaturallySpeaking fakes keyboard input like I assume it does, it should work okay. If you did this, both SL and NaturallySpeaking would have all the CPU time they wanted, theoretically allowing you to run both without errors.

Given two computer's like JuneUrutmp has, is there a utility that will allow for the effortless copying and pasting of text across two computers on a network, such that one could do something along the lines of: run Dragonspeak on one computer, highlight the text it produces, press a keystroke or issue a spoken command, and it appears in the window's copy buffer on the other machine, ready to be pasted into the text entry area?

I have a utility called Ditto, its description suggest that it can do such a thing, but I can't figure out how to get it to work across a network.

I just tried Synergy... man that is an awsome program and does exactly what you are looking for as far as copying and pasting. I just wish I had found this before I ponied up for a KVM switch a few weeks ago.

I got the Synergy program and while it took a bit of fidding to get it going - 20 minutes or so - and I just now found a Caps Lock problem and fixed that - it is running fine and the movement of the cursor from machine to machine is fine. Thanks for the tip, Kathman.