VMware is a company. Fusion is their Mac product. I highly doubt VMware will support another company's unrelated product.

However, if you're asking if Fusion will run DNS, I haven't tried it myself but there are reports that it does - search the forums for "Dragon Naturally Speaking"

I have an intel imac with 2 Ghz duo core 2, 1GB RAM. Naturally speaking 8 has always worked in Boot Camp (Win XP, SP2), and quite well at that. I use a Plantronics USB headset. It never worked right with the Parallels trial that I tried. Fusion B4, using the Boot Camp partition worked great. Better still, I have been running it in a new VM (again, XP), and have to say it works very well. For what its worth, I can even play streaming audio or iTunes in OSX through the speakers, while AT THE SAME TIME dictating and playing back my dictation through the USB headset, obviously with Dragon in the VM. I copied/imported my speech files from the Boot Camp partition into the VM. It works very well. I dictate and edit 45-100 page documents into WordPerfect 10, now in a Fusion VM.

I honestly don't recall the specifics, but I just plug in the USB mic, and/or make sure that it is connected in Fusion, and launch DNS. I have at times forgotten to connect the USB mic, launched DNS, and received a message to the effect that it can't find the mic, then connected the mic into Fusion, and merely continued loading my user into DNS. I have never had to "trick" DNS into using a pseudo line-in.

OK. I finally got this thing to work. Just a recap. I have a 24"iMac
2.16 ghz intel duo core processor with 2gb RAM (1gb to the Mac and 1gb
to Fusion). I am running Leopard 10.5.1 (the new update released last
week) and have installed Fusion 1.1 and am running Win XP Pro w/ SP2. I
have put dragon naturally speaking (DNS) on and loaded all of my
voabulaires from the PC I use it on at my office. I am a physician and
we use DNS to transcribe our dictations into a electronic medical
record. I have tested a Phillips Speechmike Pro II USB microphone and a
Logitech desktop USB microphone and both work great. In fact, with the
Phillips Speechmike Pro II, I have even gotten the "Function keys" -
specifically the record button - programmed to turn the microphone on
and off.

Here is what I did. BEFORE starting the VM, plug in
whichever USB device you are going to use. Next, in OS X, click system
preferences, then sound, then input, and then click the USB device you
have plugged in. This now tells the MAC that the USB device will be the
audio input for the CPU. Now start the VM. Once it is up and running,
along the bottom right of the VM screen you will see some USB symbols
next to the CD symbol. Put the mouse pointer over the USB symbols and
it will tell you what is connected to each one. When you find the
symbol that has your microphone device connected, click the USB symbol
and then click "Connect". This now tells the VM to use this device for
audio input. That is it. You are now ready to use the microphone and
DNS.

I have tried this same scenario with a Line/In microphone
and headset microphone without success. From what I have read on the
discussion boards, it does not appear as if Fusion supports Line/In
devices (I may be wrong on that but I have not read otherwise and
cannot get it to work myself). The only other tidbit I would offer is
that DNS is very RAM and Processor intensive. On a PC I use 2gb of RAM
just for the DNS and it works well. If you have performance problems, I
would try to designate at least 2gb of RAM to the VM if possible. I
think it will help with overall performance.

I welcome anyone elses feedback, experiences, tips or tricks.

No, Dragon will be limited to running in the VM.


Yes, you still need Windows.

Yes, DNS does work on the Mac side. It just is in a round about way. On the VM side, it works seamlessly. I do not know about with Vista as I do not have it. I run Win XP Pro w/ SP2. To use DNS on the mac side, just open the VM and start running windows. Next open a wordpad or word document ON THE WINDOWS SIDE. With DNS up and running, say the command "show dictation box". This opens the dictation box and you can dictate whatever you want. When you are finished, highlight the text you dictated and then right click onit and select copy. Now click on the Mac OS side and put you cursor in word, excel, powerpoint, pages, numbers, keynote, firfox, or mail and the select paste and it pastes the text that you generated using DNS. I know it is a work aorund but it does work.

Your last question, do you have to install Windows. Yes because to my knowledge DNS is only compatible with windows.

Sokolovss:

Outstanding response. It sounds like you have a working version using
Fusion 1.1 and 10.5.1? You are using Leopard?

dkw