13.0

Customizing the Vocabulary from Existing Documents

You now know about importing lists of entries into the Vocabulary. Another efficient way to boost your accuracy is

to let Dragon analyze text that is similar to what you are likely to dictate: the Add Words From Documents tool use

many documents at once to “harvest” potential words to add to the Vocabulary, as well as to “adapt to the writing

style” (i.e., learn frequency information). 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 this application lets you copy text so you can paste it in the DragonPad

and save it from there, or whether it offers a way to extract plain text (it could be called “export” or “save as

outline” for instance.) 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 dictation you will usually be doing, 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. The Help contains more details on this tool, including how to best prepare documents for

analysis.

Now that you have texts similar to your intended dictations, let’s designate them for analysis. (If you

obtain more documents later, you can designate them to Dragon at that time.)

Step 3: Say "switch to DragonBar", then "vocabulary" to open the menu, then "learn from specific

documents."(There are other ways to do, by voice or by hand.)

Checking the box “Adapt to writing style”

will make 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.