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Table Of Contents

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.

The greater the amount of relevant text Dragon gets to analyze, the better it can adapt its Vocabulary to what

you usually need to dictate. (This is similar to giving a just-hired transcriptionist many documents in which to

observe the terms used, their spellings, the words that often appear before or after, etc.; doing so would help

the transcriptionist get ready to transcribe your dictations most accurately, right from the start.)

Dragon can perform its text analysis on files of the following types: .txt (plain text), .rtf (Rich Text), .doc(x)

(Microsoft Word), .wpd (Corel WordPerfect), and HTML formats.

TIP If significant text exists only in an application that doesn’t normally produce files of these types

(PowerPoint is an example), see whether the application offers a way to obtain content as plain text (it could

be called “export” or “outline”.) Also, if essential text only exists as PDF or in paper form, consider using

Optical Character Recognition software such as OmniPage to convert into one of the accepted formats.

Step 1: Locate some electronic documents you have written—think of reports, letters, memos, proposals... (As

long as they are similar to what you intend to dictate, you can also use documents written by someone

else.)

The more closely these documents match the kind of text you will usually dictate, the better.

Step 2: Spell-check the documents if necessary (since Dragon would detect misspellings as unknown words.) In

addition, remove any foreign-language sections that might be present. Then, make sure the

documents are closed.

TIP The Help contains more details on this tool, including how to best prepare documents for analysis.

Now that you have a sample of text similar to your intended dictations, let’s launch the tool and

designate this sample for analysis. (If you obtain more documents later, you can run the tool again.)

Step 3: Say add words from documents or choose that link in the Accuracy Center.

Sample Only