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Why Customizing the Vocabulary is Important

Transcribing a person’s speech presents acoustic challenges, such as accents and ambient noise. There is also a

lexical challenge; for the transcription to be precisely accurate, familiarity with the terms used is necessary.

Even an experienced legal secretary would have trouble transcribing an insurance executive’s dictation, for

instance! And a newly-hired transcriptionist would have to get used not only to the dictators’ voices, but also

to learn the correct spelling and formatting of what they mention, 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 recognize and 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 acoustic 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 colleagues.

Key points about Vocabulary customization

9 As soon as you have created a User profile, you could start dictating. However, customizing the

Vocabulary right away is efficient 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.

9 Dragon offers many simple and powerful Vocabulary tools to allow you to make your dictations faster

and more convenient.