Spider Trax

Frustration strikes

Having been using Dragon almost continuously for about five days, I suddenly hit a brick wall with regard to accuracy. Instead of my accuracy steadily improving, it seemed to get worse, until at one point I considered giving up in disgust. In an effort to try and improve what appeared to be poor audio settings, I tried running the Audio Settings Wizard a few times in the hopes that this would highlight what the problem was.

From what I could tell, if I tried to increase the audio volume, the Wizard would complain the sound volume was too high. If I reduced the audio volume, the Wizard would complain that the signal to noise ratio was too low. This seemed to be no satisfying the thing! Realising that microphone positioning was of the utmost importance, I kept revisiting the images within the Audio Wizard – trying to work out whether my microphone was positioned correctly. I checked in the user manual. No additional help there – just the same two images I’d seen in the Audio Wizard.

Eventually I started searching through the Help files for information on microphone positioning. Lo and behold, I came across a page that gave step-by-step instructions on how to adjust and position a headset microphone! I’d had the microphone positioned badly right from the start! Instead of having the microphone positioned to one side of the mouth, I’d been trying to position it directly in front of my mouth -resulting in very poor audio quality.

What gets me is that I carefully read the user manual before I installed Dragon. Where were the step-by-step instructions then? What’s the use of burying them in the Help files when they’re needed right from the word Go? The PDF version of the user manual is 224 pages long and they seem to have missed the most important page of all.