Chapter 21
In This Chapter
Looking for help on the desktop
Calling or sending messages to Nuance Technical Support
Searching for answers on the Nuance website
Finding training on the Nuance website
Using social media to connect with other Dragon users
Every once in a while, you run across a problem that stands far above its colleagues. What to do? You can’t find anything like it in this book or in the Dragon Professional Individual Help files. Even when you bring the problem to your local know-it-all, the one who makes you feel stupid even if you only say hello, he just smiles and says, “No kidding? It does that, huh?”
In other words, you need one-on-one attention from somebody who isn’t just smart in a general way, but who really knows Dragon Professional Individual. Where do you find such people? One obvious place to look is on www.nuance.com
. You can call or send messages to its Technical Support department.
Another place to look is among other Dragon users. By posting a question on a social media site or its online forum, you can get your question to the attention of Dragon users all over the world. Some of them are pretty darn smart, and a few of them may have seen exactly the same problem you are encountering.
Of course, the Dragon Professional Individual software includes various types of Help files, and that’s where I begin my coverage of how to get help with the software.
As does any good software product, Dragon Professional Individual has help files that are installed with the software. In addition, Nuance Communications has done quite a bit of work on the interface to provide help for Dragon Professional Individual. Nuance also has a new Help Center so that you can search on help topics when you need them. Here are some of the ways that you can find help directly from the DragonBar on your desktop:
You can always access the Help Center when you’re dictating. Go to the DragonBar and choose Help ⇒ Help Topics, or say, “Show Help Topics” or “What can I say?”
The Dragon Help Center has links directly to several main topics and subtopics. Make sure to scroll down to the end of each subtopic link to find related procedures and additional information. In Figure 21-1, you see the links for the following:
When you look at the Help Center, you are never far away from exact commands you can use.
Nuance offers many ways to help you learn how to use Dragon Professional Individual. You can ask questions on the support portal, call tech support and speak to an expert, and search the Nuance Knowledgebase for answers. Table 21-1 and the following sections provide more details.
Table 21-1 Where to Find Nuance Communications, Inc.
To Contact Them |
Try This |
Customer Service (Phone) |
800-654-1187 |
Technical Support (Online) (Phone) |
Create email account for support 770-702-6014 |
Headquarters Address Phone Fax |
1 Wayside Road, Burlington, MA 01803 781-565-5000 781-565-5001 |
Web |
Murphy’s Law dictates that companies will reorganize their websites as soon as anyone writes about them, so don’t be terribly surprised if particular features of the Dragon website are not exactly where I say they are. (Odds are that the features I mention are still there somewhere.) Nuance does a very good job of structuring its website, so if you look around, you should be able to find things, even if they’ve recently moved.
To access the support portal, you need to set up a free account. From this account, you can register your products, access your stored serial numbers, send a message to the Technical Support department, learn about new Dragon products, or order upgrades.
In general, the better you define your question, the more likely you are to get satisfaction from your email message. If you can say, “When I do this and that, I get such and such error message,” the technical support staffers have a better chance to figure out what’s wrong and give you a written answer. They also can do a good job with “How do I make Dragon Professional Individual do X?” questions, though I believe I answer almost all those in this book. And questions like “Where can I find more about improving my accuracy?” can be easily handled in writing.
To set up an online account and ask your first question, do the following:
Choose the Get Support link under the picture of Dragon NaturallySpeaking (this includes Dragon Professional Individual.)
You are taken to Nuance’s Tech Support page (shown in Figure 21-2), which has a Customer Login button.
Click the Customer Login button.
You will be asked to create an account.
Click the Create a New Account button.
At the prompts, fill in your information.
Click Submit.
A screen appears that says you have created your account successfully and that you should check your email to validate the account.
Go to your email and click the link.
You are congratulated for setting up your account and there is a button for you to use if you haven’t already registered Dragon Professional Individual.
Repeat Steps 2 and 3. Then log in to your account where prompted.
You are taken to the My Stuff area, where you see information about the products you registered.
Click the Ask a Question link, and then click the Ask a Question link at the next screen.
Fill in your question where prompted. You must have a valid serial number if you are asking about your specific situation.
Click Continue until you have answered all the questions.
You will arrive at a page that gives you a reference number for your question.
Return to the My Stuff area and click the Notifications button to see the answer to your question.
You will also receive an email (at the email address you put on your account) with the answer to your question. If you need to continue the conversation, there is a link to the My Stuff area for you to post a reply.
If Dragon Professional Individual does something you really don’t understand and have a tough time explaining, or if it does something seemingly simple but gives you no information to work with (like failing to install or refusing to respond), you need to talk to a person on the phone.
I don’t list pricing for tech support, in case it has changed since this book published. To determine what you will pay and the parameters under which you may call, go to www.nuance.com/support/dragon-naturallyspeaking/index.htm#contact_support
.
The first thing to understand about Nuance’s costs for tech support calls is that they are structured to cost more if you don’t first use the question-based system through your free account. (See the preceding section.) Here are your options for speaking directly to a support person:
A conversation with Technical Support proceeds much more efficiently if you gather the significant information before you call. (Being well-organized has the added benefit of establishing that you are not a complete idiot and therefore that you may be facing a real problem.)
You should also know what version of Dragon Professional Individual you have, both the release number (14, say) the edition and the serial number. This information displays from the DragonBar by choosing Help ⇒ About Dragon.
Nuance has taken great pains to handle most system configurations seamlessly. Still, a percentage of the real problems people have with Dragon Professional Individual (as opposed to the apparent problems caused by using the product incorrectly) occur from mismatches between the user’s hardware and the hardware Dragon had in mind when it created Dragon Professional Individual. For this reason, the technical support person will likely want to know the following information:
The first thing that Nuance wants to establish when you call the technical support department is that you are a bona fide customer. This is why they ask for your product serial number. It isn’t a fool proof method, but it does eliminate some of the abuse. You find it on the DVD sleeve or for downloads, it’s in the email you received.
Take notes. In particular, write down any changes that the technical support person tells you to make. If these changes don’t solve the problem (or at least make it better), you may want to undo them later. This likely will not be the case. Most often, tech support folks will swiftly and professionally handle the issue.
A difficult problem can take more than one phone call to straighten out, and you may end up dealing with more than one person. This process goes much more smoothly if you can tell the current person you are talking to exactly what the previous person had you do.
Take very good notes if you end up doing something to the Windows Registry. (You’ll know because you start using a program called RegEdit.)
If you like to look things up yourself rather than ask for help, the Dragon website provides ample reference sources you can look through. If the particular problem you’re facing isn’t absolutely unique to your system (and most problems aren’t), chances are somebody has already asked Dragon’s tech support people about it.
If someone has, you can look it up. When the technical support department staffers run into a new problem, they write down their solutions in their knowledgebase so that their own people can look it up rather than solve the same problem over and over again. Those answers are available to you on the website.
Whenever the technical support people at Dragon figure out how to solve a problem with Dragon, they write an answer for the knowledgebase. Follow these steps to scan the latest answers:
Click the Knowledgebase link under the Dragon NaturallySpeaking box.
Scroll down to the center of the page and you’ll see a Search Nuance Knowledgebase prompt box, as shown in Figure 21-3.
You’ll find a list of answers arranged by date, with the most recent on top. It reads like a long troubleshooting guide, with the title of the note being the statement of a problem, such as “Registration reminder continues to appear after successfully registering the product.” You can also do a search for a topic by saying, “Search Nuance support for <topic>.”
Sometimes looking through the answers in order can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Unless you know that the answer you want has been posted to the website in the last few days, you can look at a lot of message titles without finding what you’re looking for. Fortunately, Dragon provides an Advanced Search button to help you dig deeper.
If you’re buying a new system or looking to upgrade part of the system you have, you can use the site’s Hardware Compatibility Guide to check whether Nuance has tested your system’s performance with Dragon Professional Individual.
To access the Hardware Compatibility Guide select Support from the menu and click Get Support under the Dragon NaturallySpeaking box. The Hardware Compatibility link is on the left side. You can also go there directly by using http://support.nuance.com/compatibility
.
When you arrive at the Hardware Compatibility page, click the kind of hardware you want to check out: microphones, notebook computers, desktop computers, recorders, sound cards, or miscellaneous to see a list of devices that Dragon has evaluated in its compatibility labs. (See Chapter 11 for more information.)
On the same Support page (see Step 2 in “Scanning the knowledgebase”), off the home page is a link to downloads that are available for your software. Click the Search Software Downloads link.
On the same Support page (see Step 2 in “Scanning the knowledgebase”), off the home page you will see the Product Activation link. Click this if you have questions about the activation process.
Nuance provides additional resources to help you learn how to use Dragon Professional Individual. The company makes it a point to provide a variety of formats because people have different learning styles. You will find the following information at http://www.nuance.com/for-business/by-product/dragon/product-resources/user-documentation/index.htm
See the links for User Guides; Workbook; Cheat Sheets; Instructional Videos and Administrator Guide. Here’s what you can find in each section:
The following system requirements apply to the Dragon Professional Individual edition of Dragon.
The system requirements for Dragon Professional Individual are as follows:
support.nuance.com/compatibility
for more information.A DVD-ROM drive may be required for installation, and an Internet connection is required for product activation.
In addition to making expert opinions and information available to you, the Internet also gives you ample opportunities to trade information with other users. Through these media, you can find out what problems other users are having; ask questions of your own; answer other users’ questions; share experiences; commiserate; speculate about the motivations, intelligence, and personal hygiene of the people who wrote whatever part of Dragon Professional Individual you’re currently having trouble with; and (most important of all) tell everyone about what a wonderful, readable, insightful book you have found.
The Dragon NaturallySpeaking Discussion Forum is public and active (it includes information about Dragon Professional Individual). It covers such topics as How to, Troubleshooting, and Specific hardware use. To participate, you can find the site, shown in Figure 21-4, at http://nuance-community.custhelp.com/hives/be1ac29547/summary
.
Like most major consumer software, Dragon has an official Facebook page. Some companies treat their Facebook pages as an afterthought. Nuance is not one of them. Nuance’s Facebook page contains lots of quality content worth looking at.
You’ll find comments from Dragon users along with answers from Nuance staff. You’ll also see Customer of the Week highlights and pictures uploaded by Nuance at various tradeshows and other events.
Respond to a post and jump into the discussions going on. This Facebook page, shown in Figure 21-5, resides at http://facebook.com/dragonnaturallyspeaking
.
Nuance maintains several feeds on Twitter.com. Two that are pertinent to the topics covered in this book are
https://twitter.com/dragontweets
.http://twitter.com/#!/NuanceMobile
. For information on using mobile devices with Dragon Professional Individual, see Chapter 14.The Dragon NaturallySpeaking LinkedIn group (which includes Dragon Professional Individual) is by invitation only. Nuance runs it and has several staffers contributing to it. I find the wide-ranging discussions most useful.
You can find anything from practical tips to hardware discussions to productivity questions or anything you want to share about using Dragon Professional Individual, as shown in Figure 21-8.
If you browse over to Nuance’s Dragon channel on YouTube, there’s lots to see. Nuance’s purpose for the channel is to tell you everything you’d like to know about its products and help you find the best ways to put them to use. There’s a video on version 13, as shown in Figure 21-9, at http://youtube.com/NuanceDragon
. In addition, you’ll see lots of other videos uploaded by fans of the software.
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