[fr]
Voici le récit de mon installation sans histoire du Dragon dans Parallels, ce qui me permet maintenant de dicter sur mon Mac.
[en]
One of the things I wanted to do during my two weeks in England (besides go down to London and have some fun there with friends) was get Dragon NaturallySpeaking working in Parallels, and get seriously started on this bookwriting thing. Said bookwriting thing is happening in French, which means I’m afraid there will not be much in that department for my English readers.
Getting Dragon to work was a breeze. I had already installed Parallels once, but before I managed to install Dragon on it the virtual machine crashed so badly I gave up. My hands were hurting pretty badly at that time, so instead, I concentrated on spending less time online.
This time, I downloaded a fresh version of Parallels, ran the uninstaller first to make sure any traces of the previous installation had disappeared (I had deleted things manually), installed it and did an express install of Windows XP. Maybe I was lucky, but everything went smoothly. Oh, yes, I almost forgot: before installing Parallels, I plugged in my USB microphone and selected it as the default input in OSX audio settings.
The installation of Dragon went smoothly too, much to my surprise. I’m so used to things not going the way I want them to when it comes to computers! I edited the virtual machine to add a bit of memory, restarted it, launched Dragon, and created a user. The microphone passed the test straight away. And the recognition accuracy of Dragon 9 is just incredible!
Using the “coherence mode” in Parallels, I can get rid of the Windows OS cruft which surrounds my Dragon. It makes switching back and forth from dictating in DragonPad and goofing around in my OSX applications really easy. This is what it looks like:
I’m just disappointed that I haven’t managed to get the VNC hack to work, as it would allow me to dictate directly into OSX applications. But other than that, I’m really happy and reconnecting with the joys of dictation, which I had sadly forgotten during these last years in OSX land. It’s really much, much more comfortable than typing.
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4 Comments
If you haven’t looked at it yet, you might also want to give CrossOver Mac http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/ a try.
I’ll give it a shot, but honestly I don’t have very high hopes. It’s not on the supported list, and speech recognition stuff is… well, delicate. (Dragon was, like, the one application which didn’t work on VirtualPC, and needed workarounds to work in the first version of Parallels.)
Ah well, Crossover needs my OSX install disk, and I don’t have it with me here. This will have to wait until I get back home!
Just out of curiosity, how much memory do you have in machine, and how much is dedicated to the XP virtual machine? I had Parallels set up with DNS 9 Preferred back in February, but it was dog slow on my 2 GHz MacBook with 2 GB of RAM (1GB available to XP).
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[...] Mise à jour 09.2007: Bonne nouvelle pour tous, Dragon NaturallySpeaking tourne très bien sous Parallels avec OSX. On peut donc dicter sur nos Macs! [...]