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CHAPTER 3
Improving Your Speech Recognition
Dragon NaturallySpeaking User’s Guide
32
chapter concludes by explaining when and how to run General Training
again to improve your recognition accuracy.
About the vocabulary
The Dragon NaturallySpeaking vocabulary contains the words the
program can recognize when you say them. The vocabulary contains
thousands of words and their common pronunciations. It also contains
language data about how frequently words are used alone and in
combination with others.
When you first start Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it creates a standard
vocabulary on your computer. A vocabulary contains active words (the
active vocabulary) and backup words (the backup dictionary).
Active words
The most commonly used vocabulary words are kept active (stored in
computer memory). When you dictate these words, Dragon
NaturallySpeaking is likely to get them right on the first try (that is,
without requiring you to do anything extra, such as correcting the
words).
For example, all the words in the following sentence are active
(including “Mbeki”), so Dragon NaturallySpeaking should be able to
recognize them all correctly on the first try.
Today [comma] the Prime Minister met President Mbeki of South Africa
Don’t worry that the words you want to say won’t be active. The list of
active words is very long and continually changes (as you correct
mistakes) to always include words you’re likely to use.
Backup dictionary words
All the vocabulary words that are not currently active are kept in the
backup dictionary (stored on your computer’s hard disk, not in memory).
Dragon NaturallySpeaking can recognize words in the backup dictionary,
but not on the first try.
If Dragon NaturallySpeaking has trouble recognizing a word, it may
mean that this word is only in the backup dictionary. You can add a word
to the active vocabulary by correcting it (see “Correcting recognition
mistakes” on page 15).
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