Running Dragon Naturally Speaking with Audacity at the Same Time

Today I wanted to run a quick little test with Audacity and Dragon Naturally Speaking. Essentially this is a proof of concept test. I’m working to prove:

That both dragon naturally speaking and Audacity can operate at the same time
that a podcast can be created, recorded and transcribed at the same time
that regular amplified microphones can work as good as the noise cancellation microphone that comes with dragon naturally speaking 9 preferred (that’s a mouthful of a title!)

Here’s my microphones (The Tapco mixing board is off camera)

Understand there are times when I want to use the dragon headset, but when I’m at home, sometimes I don’t want the distraction or I want the podcast headphones on my ears and not the dragon headphone.

Here’s the podcast and recording of the session:

Here’s the text from my transcription:

This afternoon I’m testing out a microphone system running through a mixer board and plugged into my laptop. I’m actually running dual microphones, so I’m being captured in stereo is then routed to my laptop via Mono. (I’m not an audio engineer so I have no idea what I’m talking about just using the best words I can think of to describe what I’m doing.)
Why am I doing this?
I wanted to see if I could use the microphones in this way such that I don’t have a headset on my head. I’m about 6 inches away from my microphones which are sitting on my desk. You can call us and experiment. I’m going to expanding this experiment in the future to run Dragon NaturallySpeaking and audacity, a podcasting software, so that I can determine if I can podcast and transcribe my taxed at the same time.
After trying a quick test, I’m now using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and audacity at the same time. As I do this I’m going to stop using punctuation such as words like ‘Period’ and ‘Coma’ because I’m actually recording a podcast with audacity.
It’s a hard habit to break! Anyway this is actually working fairly well. I’m recording the words on a Word document with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I’ve got audacity running on a separate screen I can see that my voice is being captured perfectly on audacity and I can see that my words (are) being captured almost perfectly in Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

There is one issue though, if I slip in and out of a particular screen meaning out of Word and into audacity to pause or stop Audacity then my words are no longer captured in Microsoft Word as the active screen has to be continually open for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to capture the words. It’s just a little thing but I could see some situations where I could become a problem.

So there’s the demo. Its been a while since I tried something like this. I had used the microphones before just with DNS9, and I had used DNS9′s headset with audacity.

Note, I’m also publishing this podcast through Utterz and then embedding the audio into the blog post after the fact.

In the future, I suspect that I might use the headset more often when I’m traveling as its not practical to take my mixing board and other gear on a plane, to the beach and you don’t see too many podcasters on cruises with a full radio studio or anything like that.