Standard tips

• Have enough memory. During normal operation of your computer the last thing you want is to have your computer need to go to the swap disk.
• These days 512 MB is a good starting point, and depending on how aggressively you use your computer, you may wish to increase to 1 GB or more. A quick rule of thumb, if you have any disk activity when switching tasks, you need to buy more memory. For more detail, see HowToDetermineAmountOfMemoryNeeded
• Have a fast processor - there's no need to go and get the most expensive CPU however...
• Version 8 or ealier: Create your user files with the 35,000 word medium-sized vocabulary rather than the default 65,000 word general large vocabulary.

Semi-useful tips

• Many speech-recognition web sites will tell you to defragment your disk. While this is generally a good idea (I use Executive Software Diskeeper), it's unlikely to significantly improve the performance of your speech recognition. Concentrate first on having a fast processor and enough memory.
• Keep your StartUp programs to a minimum. AutoRuns is a great tool to see what will run when Windows starts (see UsefulTools for more speech-recognition related utilities).

Options settings tips

Commands tab

• Untick "Enable mouse motion commands" (if you don't need to use it).
• Untick "Enable commands in HTML windows" (if you don't use Dragon to surf the Net).

View tab

• Tick "Anchor".

Data tab

• Change "Disk space reserved for playback" to 500MB (you can go to 2147MB if you do large documents).
• If you don't use Acoustic Optimiser, untick "Store corrections in archive".

Miscellaneous tab

• You may want to play around with the "Speed vs Accuracy" but that depends how accurate your dictation is.

Hot Keys

• If you use MS Excel, you may want to change the hot keys as it would interfere with using the numeric keypad for Excel.

Experimental tips

Disabling virtual memory

Many people have noticed that Dragon NaturallySpeaking does not use more than 100 MB of memory, even on machines which have plenty of available physical memory. A frequently suggested idea is to reduce size of the paging file to 0, in the hope that this will encourage the operating system to load more of the program into direct memory. Sometimes it is alleged that this is a bad idea and that no change will be experienced.

But nowadays, RAM is almost absurdly cheap, and in Windows XP systems with 1 GB of RAM or above, you can indeed switch off the swapfile completely. Almost any modern application, including Dragon NaturallySpeaking, will run very well without a swapfile. If you don't try to run dozens of large applications at the same time, Windows XP won't have any problems either.

Having no swapfile makes resumption of dictation in Dragon NaturallySpeaking much faster, after having paused dictation for a while and having worked with other apps in the meantime - since all of Dragon NaturallySpeaking is always kept in RAM even if it's not used for some time.

With swapfile, you will recognize disk activity as soon as you return to dictation, as well as an initial delay of up to some seconds until Dragon NaturallySpeaking comes back to its normal responisveness.

Note -- there is some disagreement on this. It's my understanding that it's impossible to disable virtual memory on Windows, and that setting the swap file to zero spimply results in a on-the-fly fragmented swap file created as needed. --sw

Nope - No problem with disabling the swapfile. I haven't had a swapfile on Desktop and Laptop for some years now. --dp

ScottW -- sorry, let me clarify - it's clearly possible to have the user settings configured so that there is no swap file, but if your virtual memory requirements exceed your physical memory, Windows will create swap space.

Scott, Windows will definitely not create swap space in this case. Instead you will get an error message about not having enough memory. What is called "Pagefile usage" in Windows Task Manager actually is "Commit Charge", meaning that Windows Task Manager is clearly wrong. Read all about it here: http://kuerzer.de/Pagefile-DNS

David.P

Start Dragon NaturallySpeaking with a higher than normal process priority.

This approach does have risks however, as it can hang the system. I used to use this technique, but I no longer think it adds any value. Additionally, running an acoustic optimizer session will render your machine inoperable for the duration of the optimization

• To try this for the current session do the following

1. using the task manager (that's {Ctrl+Alt+Delete}->Task Manager) find the NatSpeak.exe process
2. right-click
3. set priority
4. choose high or real-time

• To set this for each session, take the following steps

1. Start menu->All programs->Start up
2. right-click on the Dragon NaturallySpeaking item, and select properties
3. change the target text to the following

 C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /c start /High /D"C:\Program Files\ScanSoft\NaturallySpeaking\Program\" natspeak.exe

OR if this doesn't work for you, this just might (based on the assumption you have a Win 2000 machine) :

 C:\WINNT\system32\CMD.EXE /C "Start /High /B /DC:\Progra~1\Scansoft\Natura~1\Program\ C:\Progra~1\Scansoft\Natura~1\Program\Natspeak.EXE"

And clearly, if you've installed Windows or Dragon NaturallySpeaking to a nondefault installation path, you'll have to change the above.

if you want a voice command to change the priority dynamically, take a look at ChangeNatLinkSystemPriority

Ideas that don't work

Using a RAM disk

Some are bothered by the moderate level of disk activity when dictating. I spent some time investigating whether or not moving some files to a RAM disk could help performance of NaturallySpeaking. The short answer, is no. NaturallySpeaking's performance is CPU bound. See RamDisksDontHelp for more detail.

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