DTalks - 24 days from purchase & all attempts to install fail

RayAlsop_3f382fe1b0

DTalks - 24 days from purchase & all attempts to install fail

DTalks is a chatbot with its own avatar, Denise. It has the intention of allowing its customers to use a Daz3D character as it's avatar. It has a future potential to be a front piece for ChatGPT.

Guile Lindroth from Brazil is the author and seller. He first sold it in 2007 as Virtual Assistant Denise and in 2022 he sold it as Denise Legacy. It is now for sale on the Daz3D website as DTalks.

When downloading, the horizontal progressive download bar shows x% of 6,580 MB which is 6.58 GB. The Software takes up 7.23 GB on a hard drive. The 66 downloaded zips total 6.42 GB which, on my computer, are loaded into D:/Dtalks/Temp. There is also the installation file DTalkInstall.zip of 60 MB which is downloaded separately before you begin the installation. Near the end of the attemped install, the 66 zips are deleted from the Temp file. The readme docs say you need 8 GB free space on your hard disk before you download.

fatal flaw number one

If the download of 6.58 GB is interrupted or is disconnected from the download server there is no resume ability and the download of 6.58 GB must start again.

in a reply to my support request, Guile said “The large install file is because of the Speech Recognition engine which runs locally. This engine takes 80% of the install file, and because it need to register several .dlls, we cannot resume a previous installation.” 

DTalks has inbuilt Dragon Naturally Speaking version 12.5.

fatal flaw number two

DTalks cannot install if you have another version of Dragon on your computer.

in a reply to my support request Guile said "reinstall and at the beginning of the install uncheck the box - "install Denise's speech recognition system"”. This forces me to try another install which entails downloading the 6.58 GB again.

Fatal flaw number three

After the download, if the install stops on an error, there is no resume ability. So you must start the install again which entails being forced to download the 6.58 GB again.

Fatal flaw number four - fatal to customer having a pleasant experience.

there is no ability to download the zips without them containing DTalks' Dragon.

I personally, have a good installation of Dragon Naturally Speaking version 13.

I do not wish to download nor do I wish to install the embedded Dragon version 12.5.

Fatal flaw number five - fatal to Daz3D customer satisfaction

Daz3D offers a seven day money back guarantee. I have trouble imagining other Daz3D customers reviewing this program in seven days. I imagine other customers having trouble even downloading the program in seven days. If other customers are having the same experience that I am having then Daz3D needs to offer a 90 day money back guarantee.

By the lack of comments on the Daz3D forum it appears to me I am the only person that has purchased this program.

35.03 GB and 48 hrs 5 min of downloading so far

24 days from purchase and still can't install.

Ray Alsop

happy customer - Australia

Richard Haseltine

Moved to Technical Help as it is not a product suggestion (in sarch of, would like to see).

The product page, if I am looking at the right one, shows this as having an Install Manager option - if you use that you will be able to keep the zip (check-box at the bottom of the ready To Install tab) and not have to redownload each time, unless it is the installer handling the download live (sorry, I don't have the product to see).

The refund period is thirty days, not seven.

johnbp

I was finally able to get it installed with Guile's help...

I had to shut off virus scanner, and select "Run as Administrator" though at first this didn't help.  The main problem turned out to be an update that had crapped out.

Install log file was saying:

InstallShield 19:19:00: Invoking script function CheckForPendingReboot
Script Info: 19:19:00: Checking for pending system reboot...
Script Info: 19:19:00: Checking registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce
Script Info: 19:19:00: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce\PreRun='C:\Program Files (x86)\GIGABYTE\AppCenter\PreRun.exe' indicates pending OS reboot.
Script Info: 19:19:00: Checking registry key: svVersionNT64=603
Script Info: 19:19:00: UI Level: 2
Script Warning: 19:19:00: System reboot is pending
Script Info: 19:19:00: Cancelling installation because of pending reboot
Script Info: 19:19:00: RebootPending() return code: -3
InstallShield 19:19:00: CallScriptFunctionFromMsiCA() ends

I deleted that Registry key, and uninstalled a broken Gigabyte AppCenter that I never used anyway and then install worked.