11.0

Creating and Using Multiple Vocabularies

Every Dragon NaturallySpeaking user automatically has at least one Vocabulary. The Professional, Legal, and

Medical editions of Dragon allow you to have several Vocabularies, although it is relatively rare for a person to

need more than two or three. The advantage of having several Dragon vocabularies is being able to customize

each one to perform best for very different topics or different styles of dictation.

For instance, suppose an architect uses Dragon to dictate business letters and site reports, but also frequently

uses it to write a newsletter for his community theater group. In his work-related dictation, he might use

formal business language and mention technical terms and brands of construction materials. He might want to

add the abbreviations for building codes, as well as the names of clients, contractors and other contacts he

mentions in his work. When writing for his theater group, however, his dictation style might become

significantly more casual and the words he uses most frequently would be different.

Having multiple Vocabularies helps achieve optimal accuracy in different dictation types. The documentation

contains many details about creating and managing vocabularies. This lesson presents the essentials.

Creating a New Vocabulary

Creating a new vocabulary is very similar to customizing

your original vocabulary. It starts in the Manage

Vocabularies dialog box.

Step 1: Say Manage Vocabularies or use the DragonBar’s

Vocabulary menu

Step 2: In the New Vocabulary window, choose a

descriptive name and enter it in the Name field.

From the drop-down list, choose the vocabulary

on which you want your new vocabulary based

(what you see in the list varies if you have the

Legal edition of Dragon):

If you want to create a vocabulary which already contains the custom words from your existing

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vocabulary, choose this existing vocabulary from the list: e.g. General – Large.

If you want to create a vocabulary which does NOT contain any of the custom words from your

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existing vocabulary, choose the Base vocabulary.

Step 3: Dragon will then offer to run the Vocabulary Optimizer. This automatic tool may take a while, and is

not as powerful as the other vocabulary tools. Instead, you can choose Cancel, which exits the

Vocabulary Optimizer. Then you can customize your new vocabulary using what you learned in previous

lessons: Import a list of Words, Increase Accuracy From Email, Add Words From Documents… (see

the Accuracy Center.)

Managing Multiple Vocabularies

After creating (or importing) a new Vocabulary, you may wish to rename or delete it; both are done in the

Manage Vocabularies dialog box.