MindManager Powered by Your Voice is Here!
For a couple years now, I have been looking forward to the day when I could power MindManager with my voice. I could think it, speak it, and it would be mapped!
A couple years back, I picked up on Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, then upgraded to version 10. Neither version plays nice with MindManager 5, 6, 7, or 8!
Fortunately, a great little company has come up with a cheap solution to bridge that gap and the software is called VoxEnable.
Now, I sat down a week ago and created a series of videos showing how VoxEnable made it possible to use Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 with MindManager 8. It worked beautifully.
Unfortunately, I had my video/audio recording settings cross wired, and the audio of my voice didn’t make it into the video. Today, I finally got around to making those videos. They are a little low tech as I created them on the airplane coming out here. 
That itself was a fun little experiment. I wanted to see how the airplane sound quality might impact Dragon Naturally Speaking. (End result, no impact at all, it worked great).
The first video is above, and I will have some more videos to follow this as I get a chance to publish them this week, so don’t forget to subscribe to our site if you haven’t already!
Tags: Dragon Naturally Speaking, MindManager, voice powered mind mapping, VoxEnable
Thanks for the video. I was wondering how you captured the sound. Did you use the laptop’s in built mic?
Was the microphone a headset, regular handheld, or wireless?
Thank you for the info. I’m researching all this now for a guest post review. Have been using Dragon since their version, MindManager since 2001 but haven’t used VoxEnable yet. I’ve been using Dragon and MindManager together for about 3 months now without VoxEnable. I just hit the insert key when I need another arm of the map.
Liked your VoxEnable on the airplane demo. Thank you. I wrote you a note on another post about #3 and 4 being the same video.
Catherine
Hi, I’m wondering what version of Dragon you are using. Is it the preferred or professional? If its the pro, do you think it would work the same using the preferred?
I used Camtasia software along with the same microphone that was simultaneously powering the voice recognition. My laptop was doing double duty, recording my voice for the video and recording my voice, analyzing it and turning it into text and commands. Not to mention the video capture of my actions.
I typically use a wireless (2.6ghz Logitech) when I’m at home, but I have a noise canceling Logitech wired version. I picked it up at Best Buy for about $25.
They have a similar (probably newer) model on Amazon for $19
http://bit.ly/LogitechClearChatStyleBehindtheNeck
In general, I have had very good luck with Logitech Headsets and dragon naturally speaking, it helps when the headsets say that they are ready for voice recognition on the packaging.
I have tried several other brands of headset that were supposedly voice recognition or noise canceling available, and none of them worked well. So I pretty much stick to Logitech these days.
I have not bothered to try any of the $200 – $300 headsets or bluetooth headsets. Seems like a waste of money to me, but it could be more secure if you are working in an office environment and don’t want your signal to leak.
No problem Catherine, I appreciate your questions and feedback.
Its been about 10 months since I did these. In the interim, I’ve found that I don’t use VoxEnable that much, but that’s more of a personal working culture thing. I type very fast, and I find for MindManager work (as opposed to writing long articles for example), I like the quick flow of things from my brain through my fingers to a mindmap.
I do really like VoxEnable, but think I might need to evolve my own practices a bit more (or find the motivation or priority to teach myself).
Its possible that upgrades with either VoxEnable or MindManager could change my own personal status quo around substantially, but for now I’m not there quite yet.