How to prevent Nuance's DragonMobile from turning off VoiceOver?

Question

Nuance's DragonMobile component apparently turns off VoiceOver announcements between the initial call to SKRecognizer's initWithType:detection:language:delegate and the component's call to recognizerDidFinishRecording:. It makes some sense that they do this, since they don't want the VoiceOver announcements to be picked up by the mic and transcribed.

The problem is that there's usually a 1-2 second gap between the initialization of the recognizer and the initial call to recognizerDidBeginRecording:. In order to prevent the user's first few words from getting cut out of the transcription, it's necessary to use recognizerDidBeginRecording: to indicate to the user that they should start speaking (i.e. you can't just have them hit the mic button and start speaking immediately).

My problem is that since DragonMobile turns off VoiceOver as soon as initWithType: is called, I have no way of indicating to a VoiceOver user that they should begin talking at the appropriate time.

Answer 1

Found something of a workaround: DragonMobile allows you to specify SKEarcons, which are audio files that play whenever recording is started, stopped or canceled. I'm going to record VoiceOver making the announcements that I need and then use these recordings as the earcons, so that it will sound like the rest of VoiceOver.

According to a Nuance technical rep I just spoke to, DragonMobile does indeed take over the audio layer and suppress any output during recording, and they don't expose any way around this other than the earcons.