starting and stopping dragon naturally speaking from MS Access

[jackiemasson]

Hi,

I want to start Dragon Naturally Speaking when the user enters a field on an Access form and stop when they exit the field. I would like to save the audio file to a specific folder and pass the file name from a field value on the form. I also want the text to be inserted into the field.

Does Dragon accept command line parameters on starting?

Jackie Masson

[Rabbit]

Hi,

I want to start Dragon Naturally Speaking when the user enters a field on an Access form and stop when they exit the field. I would like to save the audio file to a specific folder and pass the file name from a field value on the form. I also want the text to be inserted into the field.

Does Dragon accept command line parameters on starting?

Jackie Masson

I've never used Dragon this isn't so much an Access question as it is a Dragon Naturally Speaking question. Have you looked at the documentation for the answer?

As for automatically saving the filename and passing it to the control on the form, this may require an API which Dragon might not provide.

[alborg]

I've never used Dragon this isn't so much an Access question as it is a Dragon Naturally Speaking question. Have you looked at the documentation for the answer?

As for automatically saving the filename and passing it to the control on the form, this may require an API which Dragon might not provide.

Gosh, this thread is over 14 years old, but quitting Dragon, which is a memory hog and which can make Access behave awfully slow, is important.

If you do a <Ctrl><Alt><Del > you will find 6 Dragon-related processes active with DNS. If you run a HijackThis app (yeah, still runs in Win 11), you can see the actual exe files that are active. Knowing this, you can create a *.bat file that can be called up from MS Access.

1) bring up Notepad and put in the following Windows code-

taskkill /im natspeak.exe /t /f
taskkill /im loggerservice.e xe /t /f
taskkill /im ereg.exe /t /f
taskkill /im sapisvr.exe /t /f
taskkill /im isuspm.exe /t /f
taskkill /im dgnsvc.exe /t /f
taskkill /im audio.exe /t /f
taskkill /im datacollector.e xe /t /f
taskkill /im dgnee.exe /t /f
taskkill /im dgnria_nmhost.e xe /t /f
taskkill /im dgnria_nmhost_F F.exe /t /f
taskkill /im dragon_support_ packager.exe /t /f
taskkill /im formfiller.exe /t /f
taskkill /im InstallationDia gnosticUtility. exe /t /f
taskkill /im itutorial.exe /t /f
taskkill /im natlink.exe /t /f
taskkill /im savewave.exe /t /f
taskkill /im ToggleFullTextC ontrolWPF.exe /t /f
taskkill /im twovermsg.exe /t /f

Save it; in this example we'll call it "KillDNS.ba t".

2) In your module "StartupPro p" put in the following code-

Public Sub ShellEx(ByVal Path As String, Optional ByVal Parameters As String, Optional ByVal HideWindow As Boolean)
If Dir(Path) > "" Then
ShellExecute 0, "open", Path, Parameters, "", IIf(HideWindow, 0, 1)
End If
End Sub

3) In MS Access, call it up-

ShellEx "c:\zfilemds\ki llDNS.bat"

Bingo- 4 of the 6 properties are killed. The 2 remaining don't seem to present much of a problem in terms of performance.

Regards,
Al

[isladogs]

@alborg
Many thanks for providing detailed assistance on this ancient thread and welcome to the forum

I experimented with Dragon whilst recuperating after a sinus operation back in 1997.
It wasn't an ideal test for obvious reasons and I abandoned it soon after.

At that time, I wasn't trying to use it with Access but in the past year I have successfully tested the Windows dictation tool with Access databases.
It can work well with long text / memo fields though is more nuisance than benefit with other fields.
I mentioned this in my recent YouTube video Set Character Limits in Long Text Fields. The relevant section is at about 02:21 into the video