Speech Recogntion, Word and Avast Pro?

General Topics
1

Win XP Pro sp2 with MS security turned off, P4 3.2, 2 gig of ram and plenty of SATA hard drive space. Mostly use Firefox and I do use Outlook. Otherwise, I “behave” - always scan an attachment and try to never get too curious , thereby clicking on something I may be sorry for later.

I have a Linksys NAT router and I run Sygate Pro as my software firewall. I am the only one who uses, my machine exept for occasional guests.

I am also running a trial version of Avast Pro which seems to work very
well. Their tech support even answered an emailed question promptly and
coherently! I was pleased.

Right now I have all the shields/providers running but I think something
is slowing down my machine:

I run Dragon Naturally Speaking (speech recognition) and I use it mostly
in Word 2002.

Avast! scans every file every time it is modified, changed, opened or
closed.

Since I dictate long documents into Word, I save the working file on a very frequent basis (well taught in the days of 5 1/4 floppies).
Everytime I save in Word, Avast! checks.

Dragon Naturally Speaking is constantly interacting with the user. Everytime a dictated correction is made, Avast checks because changes are made to the speech model file. Everytime a new speech phrase is recognized, this adds to one of Dragon’s files to adjust the speech model file accordingly. So…Avast is extremely busy and I fear, Avast is slowing it down.

It seems that Dragon Naturally Speaking and Word together, may be being
slowed down by Avast’s vigorous checking.

Would I be reasonably safe if I were to go to Standard Shield/customize
and then uncheck the box that says “scan changed/modified files”.

Does every AV check every file that changes? Does Norrton? I used to
use Norton and don’t remember seeing that.
TIA
Louise

2

You may exclude files in the settings of Standard Shield provider - these files will not be scanned. Check if the provider didnt scan all files (not only e.g. executables).

I’m just curious, but how successful Dragon Naturally Speaking in recognition is ? I tried to use MS Speech API but if I didnt define my own grammar I could not use it (I mean, it was impossible for dictate a document). On the contrary with my own grammer I could control my software with voice without any problems :).

3

I’d say you would be safe even with “Scan created/modified files” disabled.

4

You say: “You may exclude files in the settings of Standard Shield provider - these files will not be scanned. Check if the provider didnt scan all files (not only e.g. executables).”

If I were to do this, would these files still be scanned when I run a full system scan or would they be permanently off limits?

Also, with Word, for example, how would I stop avast from checking an open file everytime I save it? Would that be excluding word.exe?

To answer your question: I find Dragon Naturally Speaking very usable. I’ve tried it every few years and only in the last year or two (starting with version 7 - it’s now on 8.1), it’s been pretty good. You do have to “train” it to your voice and speech patterns, but that doesn’t take a long time with the latest version(s).

The program has two major faults - one is that it is a resource hog and you must have a good amount of memory for it to function well (1 gig minimum). The other flaw is that it’s finicky and if it gets upset, your speech file can be permanently degraded.

However, if you backup your speech files on a regular basis, you can just restore an older version and continue.

If you’re interested, please feel free to email me directly. Also, I would suggest you check out the bulletin board run by one of the VARs. www.knowbrainer.com.

Louise

5

Thanks for your information.

Try to disable “scan created/modified files” as Igor suggested.
The files/directories, you’ll exclude in the settings of the standard shield provider, will be scanned with normal scanner.

Excluding word.exe file doesnt applies on all files this application work with, it’d not help.