13.0

“ open quote

” close quote

( open paren or open parenthesis

) close paren or close parenthesis

… ellipsis or dot dot dot

& ampersand or and sign

-- dash

- hyphen

TIP: You don’t always have to say hyphens: thanks to its built-in Vocabulary, Dragon can automatically include

hyphens in items such as 3-year-old, above-mentioned, after-tax, ad-libbed, ankle-length, anti-infective, as well as

famous hyphenated names like Abdul-Jabbar. (To see many, you can choose “Words containing punctuation” in

the Vocabulary Editor’s dropdown list “Display”.)

You can prevent Dragon from entering a hyphen by pausing or saying “spacebar” where the hyphen would be.

Exercise 4: Dictate the following sample. (If any recognition errors occur, ignore them for now.)

These lessons remind me that "practice makes perfect." (Who said this, Confucius?)

When it comes to speech-recognition software, truer words were never spoken…

Note: At the moment one turns off its microphone off, Dragon may still be working on the last sounds it heard.

Key points for your first dictation:

 What you dictate is transcribed at the insertion point (the blinking vertical bar), the place where characters

would appear if you started to type. Before you dictate, make sure that the desired window is not just

visible, but also has the focus.

 To modify how Dragon indicates that recognition is in progress, use the View tab of the Options dialog (to

bring up this dialog, you can say open Dragon options). To avoid situations where the Results

indicator’s icon or box prevents you from seeing something on your screen, you can "anchor" it (check the

“Anchor” checkbox, then close the Options dialog and drag the indicator to the desired place). You can

also change how long it remains on the screen.

 Speaking in longer, continuous phrases provides contextual clues and thus helps Dragon choose

between homophones like “right” and “write” or “to” and “two”.

 Punctuation is part of the dictation context—it has an impact on recognition accuracy.

 Two very frequent Dictation Commands are new paragraph (which creates a blank line) and new line.

 By default, new line does NOT trigger capitalization of the following word; you can change that through

the Vocabulary Editor’s Properties dialog.

 Your very first dictated words may take a moment to appear on the screen. This is normal.