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Why Customizing Dragon’s Vocabulary is Important

Transcribing a person’s speech presents acoustic challenges, such as accents and ambient noise. There is also

a lexical challenge; for the transcription to be precisely accurate, familiarity with the terms used is

necessary. Even an experienced legal secretary would have trouble transcribing an insurance executive’s

dictation, for instance! And a newly-hired transcriptionist would have to get used not only to the dictators’

voices, but also to learn the correct spelling and formatting of what they mention, including acronyms,

abbreviations, special phrases, names of people, places, products, etc.

An unusual name may seem commonplace to you because you use it frequently, but a person who hears it for

the first time may not be able to recognize and spell it: that name is not yet a part of this person’s vocabulary.

Similarly, if a word or phrase is not in Dragon’s active vocabulary, the software cannot transcribe it correctly

without a little instruction.

When you created your User profile, you provided acoustic information which Dragon incorporated into its

built-in acoustic model. To get optimal accuracy, you should also let the software adapt its language model.

This helps ensure that what you dictate is transcribed with the desired spelling, spacing, and even

capitalization; Dragon provides many powerful tools for it, so this important investment need not take much

time—you can even benefit from the work done by others.

Key points about Vocabulary customization

 As soon as you have created a User profile, you could start dictating. However, customizing the

Vocabulary right away is efficient since it helps Dragon “get it right the first time” (including spelling,

capitalization, and spacing) and it needn’t take much of your time. Personalizing the vocabulary

(early and often) is strongly recommended. The following pages will show you how.

 Dragon offers many simple and powerful vocabulary tools, to help you gain time and convenience.

Sample Only

Summary of content (12 pages)

PAGE 1
Why Customizing Dragon’s Vocabulary is Important Transcribing a person’s speech presents acoustic challenges, such as accents and ambient noise. There is also a lexical challenge; for the transcription to be precisely accurate, familiarity with the terms used is necessary.
PAGE 2
Customizing Your Vocabulary—Using the Vocabulary Editor Dragon’s Vocabulary Editor lets you view what can be transcribed from the computer’s active memory; it also allows you to add new entries, as well as edit existing entries—including their Spoken Forms and Properties. Let’s take a look at the Vocabulary Editor’s interface and its capabilities: Step 1: Say Edit Vocabulary (you can also click View/Edit on the DragonBar’s Words menu or View or Edit Your Vocabulary from the Accuracy Center).
PAGE 3
Some of the "words" in the Vocabulary Editor aren't single words. Of course is listed. So is as well as.
PAGE 4
From the Display drop-down list of the Vocabulary Editor, choose “Words with spoken forms only”. Take a moment to scroll through and look at existing spoken forms—you will get ideas for what kinds of entries warrant them and how they can be written. TIP Vocabulary entries may have more than one spoken form.
PAGE 5
TIP Entries containing symbols, digits, or unusual spacing are particularly likely to warrant a Spoken Form. If you add e-mail addresses to the vocabulary, giving them a Spoken Form can make them quicker to dictate: for instance, for AmyT&JohnB@yahoo.com, “Amy and John at yahoo dot com” or even just “Amy and John at yahoo”.
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Key points about the Vocabulary Editor You can access the Vocabulary Editor with a command like edit vocabulary, through the Accuracy Center, or through the Words menu of the DragonBar.  In the Vocabulary Editor, custom-added entries are marked with a red star; choosing Custom Words Only from the Display drop-down list allows you to see just the custom entries.  You can locate an item by entering it in the Written Form field.
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Importing Lists of Vocabulary Entries You now know how to add words and phrases one by one in the Vocabulary Editor. If you have many entries to add, this is not the most efficient method, particularly if you already have some relevant lists in electronic form. Dragon’s Word Import feature allows adding many vocabulary entries at once, even if they have spoken forms. Observe the sample import list in the illustration below, and identify the motivation behind each entry.
PAGE 8
Step 3: Say import custom words or, on the DragonBar, click Words, Import. Step 4: On the Add Words from Word Lists dialog, click the Add File button. The Add File window appears. Locate the file containing your list and click Open; the name of the file you designated is now displayed in the File List. If you have other lists to import, add their files in the same way. Step 5: Click Next. The software will import the listed items into the vocabulary.
PAGE 9
Customizing Your Vocabulary From Existing Documents You now know about importing lists of entries into the Vocabulary. Another efficient way to boost your accuracy through customization is to let Dragon analyze text that is similar to what you are likely to dictate: the Add Words From Documents tool can “harvest” potential words to add to the vocabulary, as well as “adapt to the writing style” (i.e., learn frequency information) from many documents at once.
PAGE 10
Make sure that the box “Preview the list of unknown words” is checked, and click Next. The checkbox “Adapt to writing style” is what makes Dragon learn frequency information, which increases accuracy since it helps differentiate between homophones, like “world” and “whirled”. Leave this box checked unless you only want to “harvest” potential custom words—for instance, if the text is very different from your normal style, or contains a foreign language. Step 4: On the Add Documents box, click Add Document.
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Step 5: Uncheck items you do NOT wish to add (you can take advantage of the Uncheck All button.) TIP This list may include capitalized forms of common words; these are usually better left out of the Vocabulary since you can always say ‘Cap’ before a word, but you may want to include them in a phrase entry, such as Senior Technical Trainer. To modify an item (to make it lowercase, to expand on it…) or give it a spoken form, highlight it then click or say Edit.
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Customizing the Vocabulary From Your E-Mail As you learned, Dragon can adapt its Vocabulary based on designated documents. It also has the ability to learn from three popular e-mail programs: Lotus Notes, Outlook, and Outlook Express. By “studying” the e-mails you sent as well as the contact names, the tool “Increase Accuracy From E-mail” can identify potentially useful names to add and adapt its statistical information on word usage (frequency and context).