Certified eSupport Technical Update banner

Dragon and Windows 8

While Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2 does not yet fully support the Windows 8.1 operating system, the Dragon Medical team at Nuance is working to validate compatibility with future releases of Dragon Medical Practice Edition and Dragon Medical 360 | Network Edition.

UPDATE: Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2.3 and higher supports Windows 8 and Windows 10.

Field reports from our channel partners indicate that the current release of Dragon Medical Practice Edition is stable within Windows 8.1 (desktop/laptop only), and that a majority of users are able to operate without issues. However, there are a few known exceptions:

1. The PowerMic II is seen by Windows 8 as a “USB microphone.” Therefore, it requires an updated driver to have full functionality. We will be happy to provide this driver to any users working with the Nuance PowerMic II.

2. Users may experience issues accessing the administrative settings.  In some cases, as displayed below, they aren’t visible in the “Tools” menu.

DragonBar Tools menu missing administrative options

3. Some Windows 8.1 users have reported that the “Check for Updates” button in the help menu is greyed out and/or missing altogether.

DragonBar check for updates grayed out

4.  Some users have received the message, “The user profile you have selected cannot be accessed”, either when closing a profile or exiting Dragon.  A majority of users can simply click “OK” to continue using the application without further issues.  A small number of users reported that they were able to get around this error by stopping and restarting the Dragon service.

Dragon error - Profile cannot be accessed

At this time, the official suggestion from Nuance is to roll back Windows 8.1 installations to Windows 8.  As most of us know, that isn’t as easy as it sounds.  Currently, we have a large number of users successfully operating Dragon Medical Practice Edition 2 within the Windows 8.1 environment.  In addition, our internal testing, using DMPE2 & DNS v12.5 with Win 8.1, yielded no errors.  However, we have worked with about a dozen cases experiencing one or all of the issues described above.

Unfortunately, the only workaround at this time is to create and use a new profile until a patch is released.

Note: If you are contemplating upgrading to Windows 8.1, we strongly recommend that you hold off until these issues have been resolved.

Verification Source and Date

Nuance Support Team, Channel Partners, and internal testing

August 15, 2014

Need Help With Dragon?

Let one of our technicians assist you

If you’re having problems installing Dragon on Windows 8, or you’re getting the error messages indicated above, we’d love to help you. Click the button below to purchase technical services, and we’ll take it from there.