Installation

This section describes how to install Dragonfly. The installation procedure of Dragonfly itself is straightforward. Its dependencies, however, differ depending on which speech recognition engine is used.

Prerequisites

To be able to use the dragonfly, you will need the following:

  • Python – available from the Python dowloads page. Version 2.7 (32-bit) is required if using Natlink.
  • Win32 extensions for Python (only for Windows users) – available from the pywin32 releases page.
  • Natlink (only for Dragon users) – latest versions available from SourceForge.
  • wmctrl, xdotool and xsel programs (only for Linux/X11 users) – usually available from your system’s package manager.

Note on Python 2.7: Python version 2.7 (32-bit) is required if using the Natlink engine back-end, at least for the moment. Support for this version is not maintained for the other engine back-ends and will be dropped completely in the first MAJOR release following stable Natlink support for Python 3.

Note for Linux users: Dragonfly is only fully functional in an X11 session. You may also need to manually set the DISPLAY environment variable. Input action classes, application contexts and the Window class will not be functional under Wayland. It is recommended that Wayland users switch to X11.

Installation of Dragonfly

Dragonfly is a Python package. It can be installed as dragonfly2 using pip:

pip install dragonfly2

The distribution name has been changed to dragonfly2 in order to upload releases to PyPI.org, but everything can still be imported using dragonfly. If you use any grammar modules that include something like pkg_resources.require("dragonfly >= 0.6.5"), you will need to either replace dragonfly with dragonfly2 or remove lines like this altogether.

If you have dragonfly installed under the original dragonfly distribution name, you’ll need to remove the old version using:

pip uninstall dragonfly

Dragonfly can also be installed by cloning this repository or downloading it from the releases page and running the following (or similar) command in the project’s root directory:

python setup.py install

If pip fails to install dragonfly2 or any of its required or extra dependencies, then you may need to upgrade pip with the following command:

pip install --upgrade pip

Installation for specific SR engine back-ends

Each Dragonfly speech recognition engine back-end and its requirements are documented separately: