11.5

4
CONTROLLING WHETHER DRAGON LISTENS
An important habit to practice: turn ON Dragon’s microphone when you
want Dragon to hear you, and turn it OFF when you don’t.
You can control Dragon’s microphone by:
• Pressing its hotkey (by default the plus (+) key on the numeric keypad.)
• Clicking the microphone icon on the DragonBar or in the Windows
®
system tray.
• Using commands such as “wake up” and “microphone off.”
On: Dragon is listening. Off: Dragon cannot hear
anything.
YOUR FIRST DICTATION
Start a word processor and make sure that your cursor is within the
document, then turn on the microphone and start dictating in a clear and
natural voice, neither yelling nor whispering. Remember to say punctua-
tion e.g. “comma” & “open quote” and commands like “new paragraph.”
As you dictate, a small Dragon icon indicates that the software is
processing your speech. There is no need to wait for Dragon to “catch up”
with you. Just dictate at a natural pace. Aim to dictate in longer phrases
and full sentences, since this gives Dragon some context and leads to
much better results than slow, halting speech.
Pause briefly before and after commands and remember to turn the
microphone off when you don’t want Dragon to transcribe.
AUTOMATIC FORMATTING AND CAPITALIZATION
You will see that Dragon automatically handles a lot of text formatting,
including prices, dates, times, phone numbers and percentages (see
Autoformatting Options in the DragonBar’s Tools menu.)
If you want to capitalize a particular word, say “cap” or “all caps” just
before it.
CORRECTING ERRORS
Personalizing the vocabulary will prevent many recognition errors,
however, some errors are inevitable. By properly correcting Dragon’s
errors, you can help it learn from them, so errors are less likely to
happen again. You can experiment with when to correct and how to
correct. (Dragon lets you do it entirely by voice, but also allows typing
over, pressing the Correction hotkey, and more.) Explore the Correction
tab of Dragon’s Options dialog (in the Tools menu of the DragonBar) to
see what you prefer for a given situation. Also see the Help.