I just received a Samson airline 77 wireless microphone from Knowbrainer.  I have to say that I'm extremely impressed with its accuracy! Simply after doing initial training, I'm getting essentially 100% accuracy! The only time DNS seems to have a difficulty is to confuse homonyms such as "Mike" with "mic," which is completely understandable.

 

I will have to say that I do not find the wireless microphone particularly comfortable to wear. I wear progressive lenses, and even with my monitor moved the lowest position, I have to lift my head a bit in order to find the clear spot when I'm working at the computer. When I lift my head, the wireless transmitter has a tendency to hit my shirt collar, which put some pressure on the earpieces. I'm not sure if there's a way to avoid this, but I will try to see if I can find a way.

 

The only other disadvantage that I have seen thus far is that whenever I take the headset off, the microphone element cover tends to fall off the end of the microphone with the slightest of friction (such as if it brushes against my face as the microphone is removed). I think the issue there is that the opening through which the end of the microphone element is placed is probably just a little bit too big. In the grand scheme of things, this is no big deal!

 

I do have one question, however. In perusing either the store or these forms, I have a vague recollection that I saw something about Knowbrainer offering to customers some sort of dictation training manual for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Am I making this up? I tried to find it again, but I didn't have any luck with this.

 

Thank you for your fine site and store.

I have used the Airline77 for years and just purchased two new units. In the attempt to make the headset more comfortable the changes that Samson made to the new model, I believe that the more flexible frame is actually trickier now to fit to your head. I sometimes wear glasses when I dictate and I find that I need to put on the Airline77 and adjust the transmitter unit so it is pushed down against my neck before I put on my glasses. I have very small titanium wireframes so it is quite easy for me to push my eyeglass ear frames between my head and the Airline77. I can imagine thicker eyeglass ear pieces might be difficult to use with this headset.

From my perspective there are actually four mechanical adjustments that you should make to the Airline77 to get the optimally comfortable and stable fit on your head.

One. Bending the frame to adjust to the distance between the ear hooks so that you get a little bit of pressure on the side of your head above your ears for stability, but not enough to give you a headache
2. Then in the back of the frame adjust the curve so that the frame comes to lie at the base of your skull (I don't use the adjustable plastic strap as I find that useless with respect to comfort and stability. I also no longer wear a tie so I have no difficulty getting the transmitter comfortably inside my shirt collar.)
3. Bending the frame just before the ear hooks so that the angles of the ear hooks as they make contact with your ears are both stable and comfortable
4. Bending the curvature of the ear hooks (I need to use padded pliers to do this but it could just be because of the damage to my hands)

This will be an iterative process because as you do each of the adjustments, you will slightly change your previous adjustments. I am pretty fiddly and twitchy. It takes me about a week of three or four times a day adjustments before my new Airline77 feels right when I put it on. For a typical workday I wear it for 12+ hours ( minus meal breaks).

I think Lunis sells the five pack of the foam microphone replacement windscreens. There is quite a lot of variation in the manufacturing of the foam and I just take one that fits. The replacement windscreens actually seem to be somewhat tighter than those that come out-of-the-box with the unit.

The KnowBrainer quick tips have some advice on dictation. The VoicePower product has excellent interactive tutorials on dictation style.

One you get the Airline 77 set up properly, your dictation accuracy is all about improving your dictation style (except for all the annoying interruptions introduced by Nuance in 11.5).

Phil Schaadt

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DNS12 Pro BM V Large Vocabulary plus KB or Voice Computer running Win7 64 bit machines with i7-2640M to i7-3960x and i7-3770K processors plus a Sony VAIO Windows 8 machine. DBX Audio Gate with Allen&Heath mixer/USB Audio; Andrea PureAudio USB  usually with Airline 77 or Audio-Technica but also Sennheiser MD431 II, theBoom, et. al.

Phil,

 

Thank you very much for your tips.  I'll try them.  I'm particularly interested in your suggestion not to use the rubber strap.  I find it not terribly comfortable, and in the holes that I need to keep the headset on right, it presses the ear hooks into my head which gives me a headache after about an hour.

 

It's good to know that one can tweak the frame safely....I was hesitant to try that for fear of causing damage.

It sounds like you're looking for our KnowBrainer Installation/Training Guide 

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Click KB 2012 REV D to Download a 30 Day Evaluation of KnowBrainer 2012 

 

 

 

Lunis, thank you for your link, but I'm afraid the link doesn't work.  I get this error message:

 

The product or category that you are trying to view is either not valid or not available. If you believe that you are receiving this message in error, contact us.

 

It should be fixed now. We have had some trouble with that link. Please try it again.

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Click KB 2012 REV D to Download a 30 Day Evaluation of KnowBrainer 2012 

 

 

 

 

If this: http://www.knowbrainer.com/NewStore/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=322&idcategory=23  is the training guide you are referring to, in this post on the Nuance site http://nuance-community.custhelp.com/posts/8af5612183 you mention that this guide (assuming it's the same one!) is free to your customers, $20 otherwise.  

 

Since I just bought an Airline 77 from you, is this something I can get a link to?  Should I send you a PM?  Or have I misunderstood something (quite possible!)

We revamped the training guide last January which is when we started charging the $20 fee. We put a lot of work into this guide and use it as an enticement to attract NaturallySpeaking customers. Although the guide is freely available to our KnowBrainer and NaturallySpeaking customers we felt that the small $20 fee wouldn’t be too much to ask for those who choose to circumvent us by purchasing NaturallySpeaking from Nuance or our competitors. You would be amazed at how many e-mails we received, during the last upgrade season, from customers that made the mistake of jumping at the chance to purchase the upgrade from a Nuance telemarketer or Digital River spam and paid heavily for making that hasty decision. Complaints ranged from “DNS 11 behaving strangely” (because they didn’t uninstall the previous version) to “my upgraded user files” are running slow (because they didn’t create a new user profile and import the vocabulary and commands from their previous profile). That is just 2 of about 20 pitfalls that can occur. The user guide even includes information on how to install the smart upgrade as a full copy so as you can imagine, we heard a lot of complaints that could have easily been avoided.

 

Our partners discussed the possibility of additionally making the training guide freely available to our microphone customers but considering that they are typically charged the same price as they would pay for the same microphone from our competition and additionally receive the following exclusive perks:

1. Telephone, e-mail and virtual on-site support
2. Neoprene zippered microphone bag
3. Various adapters, additional cables, presets and adjustments to take advantage speech recognition
4. Pictorial step-by-step instructions on how to use their microphone with NaturallySpeaking

We didn't feel the need to give away the farm (for lack of a better term) and hope you'll understand.

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Click KB 2012 REV D to Download a 30 Day Evaluation of KnowBrainer 2012 

 

 

 

 

Yup.  I understand completely, and will be ordering the training guide for $20 shortly.  I don't mind paying for it at all!  I might suggest that instead of saying (as I saw somewhere on the site, can't remember exactly where) that it is "free for our customers" (which I am), you might want to amend that to say "free for our customers who buy a version of DNS from us," which I am not (yet....when version 12 comes out, I'd rather buy it from you, I think).