Nuance Powermic

The Nuance PowerMic is affiliated with Dragon Naturally Speaking as their hand held microphone tool of choice for their advanced software sets, such as those used in medical practices. It is a high quality, hand held microphone that delivers very clean speech input for the software to perform its speech to text functionality at a consistent expected input quality from various users.

The unit itself is comprised of two sets of controls. The first set of controls is designed to control the speech to text software, while the second set of controls allows the users to easily have a hand held control surface, and buttons to operate the computer mouse for your regular onscreen display.

The mouse controls work fine through the OS, but the key here is to get at least the main microphone control working, and possibly work up-to the other controls as your product progresses. The main control is a large red button that when pressed, and held activates software into its listening mode, it switches on the microphone’s element, and illuminates a red LED on the hand tool that shows the software is in listening mode. Then when the user releases the button, the software stops listening, (PAUSE), the red LED goes out, and the microphone element is muted.

Above the microphone button is a button that will allow software to call up a text box. You can then dictate into this box.

Below the red button is a playback button that will let you hear your spoke dictation through the hand tool’s built in speaker. This is handy if something strange shows up in the printed text, and you want to confirm what you said, so you can make a manual correction on screen , with your standard keyboard.

To each side of the big red button are skip forward, and skip backward buttons to allow you to jump your courser from word to word in the on screen printed text for correction purposes.

The Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking software actually allows you to reconfigure button functions for all of the buttons on the hand tool so that these buttons can perform any type of action you might desire them to activate. The software will only allow this configuration if it detects that you have a PowerMic hand tool connected.

I hope this gives you some starting points. As a blind individual who came from a medical IT environment I have been using Dragon, and the PowerMic for over 15 years. I am a native Linux user, but have been stuck in the world of Windows, because Nuance sees no profit in porting Dragon software to an open source platform. Now that your product exists, and I just received the E-Mail that the native Linux early release version is available, you can figure out what I will be playing with the rest of the day. The only part I am missing is the PowerrMic compatibility.

Here is some other food for thought. Nuance is not the only maker of one of these hand tools. Philips makes one also. I saw it several years ago. It was a nice unit, and did the same things as the PowerMic. So I am sure other hand tool microphones exist out there for dictation purposes. It is just a matter of incorporating the compatibility interface into your softeware for a press to talk button.; Thank you for your interest in this issue in advance.