Recently I helped a friend setup Dragon Naturally Speaking on their computer so they could transcribe lectures and sermons that they’ve given. According to the Dragon Naturally Speaking website and Youtube, transcribing with Dragon was as simple as training the program and then telling it which .wav or .mp3 you wanted to have transcribed.
So I installed and setup Dragon Naturally Speaking 10.1 for my friend, I helped him train the program so it would understand his voice and then we tried to transcribe a recording he had made. I clicked on the ‘Transcribe’ button on the Dragon toolbar, navigated to the audio file to transcribe and then clicked on the second ‘Transcribe’ button. To my and my friends dismay we were greeted with an odd error message that simple stated: “You must enter a filename to read from.”
I played the .wav file and it worked fine so I tried to transcribe the file again and was greeted with the same unhelpful error message. After many hours of help file reading, converting audio files, YouTubeing, and Googleing (which showed only one unhelpful related result when searching the error message) I realized the cause of the problem. There was a semi-colon in the file name on the file to be transcribed. I removed the semi-colon from the file name, click ‘Transcribe’, navigated to the file, then clicked ‘Transcribe’ again and it worked!
If you are getting the “You must enter a filename to read from.” Error message, then try removing any characters and symbols from the filename and try again. I have only received the error when filenames have a semi-colon ( ; ) in them, but other symbols and characters may trigger the error.
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2 people talked about this:
Yes, the big puzzle: Enter WHAT filename? It's only numbers. Is thatr the file name? Dragon (Nujance) appears to have the poorest help files of any other program. All vague, not well written and very frustrating.
Again, what is the file name ACTUALLY. IS IT THE NUMBERS AND LETTERS: wHAT? i'VE TRIED THE ACTUAL LISTING,BUT NOHELP.
The file name is what ever you choose to name the file. My friend was transcribing lectures and he had name all of his files with the date he gave the lecture.
In the screen shot in the blog post the filename was all numbers. The file name was "04-18-10 11;00.wav" and the full file path of the file to be transcribed was "C:\Users\Me\Desktop\04-18-10 11;00.wav". The error was caused by the " ; " that I used in the filename. I renamed the file to "04-18-10 11.00.wav" replacing the semicolon with a period and everything worked fine.
I'll fix the wording in the article to help clarify this.
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