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Why Personalizing the Vocabulary is Essential
Transcribing a person’s speech presents acoustic challenges, such as accent and ambient noise. There is also a
lexical challenge: for the transcription to be precisely accurate, familiarity with the terms used is necessary.
For instance, even an experienced medical secretary would have trouble transcribing for an attorney’s office! And
a newly-hired transcriptionist would have to not only get used to the voices of the various speakers, but also to
learn what spellings and formatting they want, 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 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 information which Dragon incorporated into its acoustic model.
To get optimal accuracy, you should also help the software adapt its language model and Vocabulary. Lexical
customization ensures 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.
The Help contains much information about personalizing the Vocabulary—including how you can even benefit
from the customizations done by others.
Key points about Vocabulary customization
 As soon as you have created a profile, you can start dictating, but note that taking a moment to start
customizing the Vocabulary for you is a good investment to make right away, 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 allow you to make your dictations faster and
more convenient.