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by rntz 2059 days ago
Talon actually can work with Dragon; it started out requiring Dragon but has since grown its own voice recognition. Anecdotally, a lot of folks on the talon slack seem to be refugees from Dragon-based solutions, and a common observation is that Talon's voice recognition is much lower-latency than Dragon. Unfortunately I can't confirm this as I haven't used Dragon myself.

My impression of talon's speech recognition is that it's good enough for voice coding, but could be improved when it comes to dictating English prose. That said, there are promising avenues of improvement. If you pay for the Talon beta, there's a more advanced voice recognition engine available that's much better at English, and you can also hook into Chrome's voice recognition for dictation.
1 comments
lunixbochs 2059 days ago
> Talon actually can work with Dragon

More specifically, "can work" means: if you run Talon on Windows or Mac alongside Dragon, and don't configure Talon to use its own engine, Talon will automatically use Dragon as the recognition engine.

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ianhorn 2059 days ago
> or Mac alongside Dragon

Unfortunately it looks like Dragon on Mac isn't a thing anymore, which is a shame because my main dev machine is a Mac. Or at least it used to be, before I needed to start dictating everything.

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lunixbochs 2059 days ago
Talon can also use Dragon remotely from a Windows machine or VM, kind of like aenea but more tightly integrated (the host is driving instead of the guest).

And I do have some users voluntarily switching from Mac Dragon to the improved speech engine in the Talon beta. Mac Dragon has been kind of buggy for the last few years so you're not missing much.

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ianhorn 2059 days ago
Any chance you have pointers on how to set that up? You'd probably laugh/cry to see my setup right now, with my Windows desktop on the left monitors and my MacBook on the right monitors because I need both... purely because Dragon is only sold on Windows since this started been an issue for me. A more tightly coupled super-aenea sounds pretty fantastic.
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lunixbochs 2059 days ago
Sure: First run Talon on both sides. Then go to your talon home directory (click talon icon in tray -> scripting -> open ~/talon). There's a draconity.toml file there.

On the Dragon side, you need to uncomment and update the `[[socket]]` section to listen on an accessible IP.

On the client side (Mac in your case), uncomment / update the `[[remote]]` section to point at your other machine.

You also need to make sure both configs have the same secret value.

From there, restart Dragon and look in the Talon log on the Mac side for a line like "activating speech engine: Dragon".

To prevent command conflicts, I recommend setting Dragon to "command mode" (if you have DPI), and only adding scripts to Talon on the Mac side.

If it doesn't work, you can uncomment the `logfile` line in draconity.toml on the Dragon side, restart Dragon, and look in the log to see what's going on.

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