11.0

Correcting Dragon’s Errors in Your Dictated Text

Human beings sometimes can’t recognize words correctly—especially if the speaker and the listener come from

different regions, if the speaker is discussing an unfamiliar subject, or if the words are not well articulated. In

addition, when we hear a word for the first time, we may not know how to spell it. Some people’s first or last

names can be spelled different ways (like Gene/Jean, Hansen/Hanson). We often must verify how a person

spells his or her name.

This is also true for Dragon! The software uses contextual clues and statistical information to guess what to

transcribe, but sometimes cannot guess correctly. In particular, it may not recognize uncommon words on the

first try, and instead types something that was likely according to its statistics. It cannot recognize and

transcribe a word it has never seen.

Fortunately, in addition to optimizing acoustic factors, taking advantage of the vocabulary customization tools

and using proper correction techniques will significantly reduce the number of errors. Dragon’s Help contains

many details about the different ways to perform it, including by keyboard.

You can choose when to perform corrections. If you look at your screen while dictating and you notice that

Dragon just got a word wrong, it's usually best to finish your train of thought before you correct that

misrecognition: you may want to at least finish your paragraph. That being said, if the misrecognition affects a

word which is likely to appear many times in your document, it's a good idea to correct it as soon as possible.

TIP

: Be sure to take advantage of how Dragon 11 lets you directly address a specific word or phrase in your

text. When you give a command such as “correct <xyz>” (<xyz> representing the word or phrase you wish to

correct) and Dragon finds several matches for “xyz”, Dragon will place a small number next to each match, so

you can say the number of the desired one; if you wish to affect all matches at once, you can say “choose all”.

(If you want the numbers to go away, you can say “cancel”, click our mouse, or just keep dictating.) Also, you

may want to explore your application’s capabilities for replacing, including specific capitalization (the

illustration below is from Microsoft Word 2010).

IMPORTANT

: In Dragon’s commands, <xyz> represents the relevant segment on the screen (which could be

one or more words, and could include numbers or punctuation marks). When you give the ‘correct <xyz>’

command, be sure to say what appears on the screen, not what you had intended.