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Chapter 12: Improving recognition accuracy
context. For example, we use our experience and common sense to decide
whether someone said "I Scream," or "Ice Cream." But Dragon doesn't
understand what words mean, so it can't use common sense the way we do.
Instead, Dragon interprets your speech by using its knowledge of words
that tend to appear together. Dragon calculates how frequently you use
words and phrases and can offer you suggestions when it makes mistakes.
Try to think about your whole phrase or sentence before you start dictate it,
and you'll be on your way to dictation mastery. For more information, see
Dictation Basics.
2. Import lists of words or phrases Rather than adding words or phrases
one at a time, you can import one or more lists. The lists can even include
spoken forms. This method can be particularly useful for businesses that
have a lot of people dictating similar names or words or if you need to use
more than one user profile. For more information, see Preparing a list of cus-
tom words to add to a Vocabulary.
3. Learn from specific documents You can select specific documents or
entire folders containing typical documents, your own or those of others,
that reflect the type of dictation you will typically do. You can then train
Dragon how you pronounce unusual words or about proper names you need
to dictate. For example, if you were an academic and ran the tool to add
words from essays and articles in your field of study, or a blogger using a lot
of new acronyms, Dragon would automatically learn your words, word
frequency and contexts, and make better guesses about your speech.
Dragon also moves words from its backup dictionary to its active vocab-
ulary based on the scan. If there are a lot of words to train, you'll need to
plan this activity when you have a few minutes to spend adding the words.
4. Learn from sent e-mails Similar to Learn from specific documents, this
tool helps refine your profile by analyzing representative text, only in this
case it analyzes e-mail messages sent from your installed email program.
In addition to analyzing frequency of word use and typical word sequences,
it can suggest contact names you may want to add to the vocabulary.
Note:For the first run, plan this activity when you can let Dragon use your
computer for 5 to 30 minutes. Subsequent scans build on the first one, how-
ever, and are much faster.
5. Run Accuracy Tuning This process refines your user profile by analyzing
audio and text data that Dragon archives from your dictation. You can
launch Accuracy Tuning from the DragonBar Audio menu or schedule it to
run later. Choose a time when your computer is on but you can close Dragon
– for example, when you typically have a meal or a meeting.
6. Perform additional training Dragon learns about how you pronounce
words and your vocal tones when you create your user profile, but it can
learn more if you read one or more of the supplied training texts. If you
skipped the General Training step when you created your profile, we rec-
ommend that you read a training text after a few hours of using Dragon. On
the DragonBar, select Audio> Read Text to Improve Accuracy.
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