dragonfly-scripts

NO WARRANTY! All code and information in this repository is provided "AS IS". Your use of its content is at your own risk. The author/authors are not liable for any consequences from using it. ALWAYS make sure to keep backups before making any changes!

All code in this repository is licensed under LGPL3, if not explicitly stated otherwise.

Note: There is currently a lot of heavy experimenting going on in this repository, so it is not stable. Some of the information is not updated. Once the repository contents starts to stabilize, I will try to update the information texts.

What is dragonfly-scripts?

This repository contains a collection of Dragonfly Python-scripts, that can be used with Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional.

What is Dragonfly?

A speech recognition framework
A Python package, that can be used in conjuction with Natlink and Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

So what's Natlink?

Natlink is an extension to Dragon NaturallySpeaking to allow scripting beyond the Visual Basic Scripts that the speech recognition program normally supports.

Why Dragonfly?

It seems to execute much faster than the Visual Basic scripts that Dragon NaturallySpeaking normally supports.
I never could get external files working in Visual Basic scripts (in Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional), making it hard to write reusable code.
Python, even older versions, trumps Visual Basic scripts any day of the week.

Installing Natlink and Dragonfly

I recommend avoiding 64-bit on any of the packages you install, including Python. Also avoid 64-bit Java, on any applications you want to use when running Dragon naturally speaking. I have experienced problems with Dragon NaturallySpeaking when it comes to 64-bit. Particularly with Eclipse. The problems was caused by the Java virtual machine, that was in 64-bit. The most annoying problem I had, double typing of the first character or loss of the first character, was fixed by installing the Java virtual machine 32-bit version instead.

NOTE: If you have multiple Python versions, make sure you install all packages into the correct python version.

Installing Python 2.7 and Pythonwin

Alternative 1:

The pure Python package for 2.7 can be downloaded here: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.7/
Pythonwin / Python Win32 Extensions: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/pywin32/. Choose the latest build (219 at the time of writing this), then select the correct installer for your system. Use pywin32-219.win32-py2.7.exe (even if your system is 64-bit).
The config GUI needs wxPython, or you can run the command prompt version. http://wxpython.org/download.php#stable. I used wxPython2.8-win32-unicode-py27.

Alternative 2:

A package containing Python 2.7, Pythonwin, wxPython and PyXML can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/natlink/files/pythonfornatlink/ (PyXML is only used for VoiceCode)*

Installing Natlink:

This site, Unimacro, has a lot of information on the installation and configuration of Natlink. The site is mostly focused on Unimacro and Vocola 2.

You can get Natlink here: Natlink repository

Once Natlink is installed, two configuration utilities will show up in the start menu. One is a command line tool, the other is a GUI tool.

On my windows XP 32-bit machine, when I was following the instructions from the Unimacro site, when I started the "Configure Natlink Via GUI" program, I got several warning messages. However, restarting Dragon NaturallySpeaking (or perhaps just reloading Natlink), then running the configuration program again, solved that issue. I have seen the GUI configuration tool freeze completely on Windows 7 64-bit, but the command line tool worked fine.

Installing Dragonfly:

Python library site: Dragonfly

I used the dragonfly-0.6.5.win32.exe installer. Dragonfly’s installer will install the library in your Python’s local site-packages directory under the dragonfly subdirectory.