Thanks to the work of several volunteers and an anonymous helper at Nuance, the latest version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DPI 15) now works with NatLink and Dragonfly! I’ve been testing it for the last couple weeks and it works well with only a few minor issues to work around.
Although I wouldn’t call this a must-have upgrade from Dragon 14, it is a step up in a couple ways. It seems noticeably faster and more accurate than previous versions. Without an automated test setup this is difficult to measure, but I was able to achieve 99% accuracy without trying too hard on a sample passage with a brand-new profile that hadn’t been trained, which matches my previous best on a trained profile. The new profile also has the “Speed vs. Accuracy” slider at “Fastest Response”, which is the new default. Dragon 15 also has better support for formatting (e.g. “john smith at gmail dot com” –> “johnsmith@gmail.com”). You can read the full list of new features here. Note, however, that it still hasn’t fixed the rather annoying issue where natively-dictated text sometimes contains randomly repeated characters, nor does it bring back support for editing of recent utterances in unsupported applications, which has been absent since version 13.
Ready to upgrade? First, before upgrading, consider backing up your profile and exporting your vocabulary list. Dragon 15 will auto-upgrade profiles from 13 and 14 but not 12, so if you need to create a new profile you’ll be happy you exported your vocabulary.
After installing Dragon 15, I recommend upgrading to 15.6.1 before running it for the first time (I’ve had issues in the past when I did this later). It’s not a critical update but it fixes some minor usability issues so you might as well pick it up.
Next, you’ll need to install a recent version of NatLink (stable or experimental).
Finally, you may need to restructure your grammar slightly to get it working properly. Specifically, Dragon 15 has trouble with grammars with many different exported rules, causing some rules to behave as if disabled. This is easy enough to work around: just separate the rules into different grammars, and it’ll work fine.
Huge thanks to the volunteers that managed to get the latest version of Dragon working again with NatLink. If you’d like to donate to support their efforts, you can do so through PayPal.
Still doesn’t work for me. Everything installs and seems to check out but I can’t use ‘edit voice commands’ etc
My first guess would be that this is caused by the “multiple rules in one grammar” issue. Try moving one of the problematic commands into its own grammar instance (no need to separate the file), then restart Dragon and see if that resolves it.
I think I figured it out. The uninstall for Tango didn’t work properly. Once I uninstalled it and deleted the old Natlink folder. It seems to work okay. Thanks anyway.
Hello! could start using Dragon 13 anyways and still have the same results?
If you are using Dragon 13, you don’t need to worry about the details of this post. You can definitely get started with that, no problem. There’s a discussion of Dragon versions here.
Is somebody able to tell me please which of Home will suffice or if Professional is required in order to get NatLink Dragonfly to all work together?
Home should be fine. At least that’s how it was for every previous version!
In case someone still struggles installing dragonfly with natlink this will fix it: https://youtu.be/RVcXQe_7bjA