10.0

IMPORTANT: The location and behavior of the Results box can be customized from the Options dialog’s

View tab. Many users find it most convenient to “anchor” the Results box to a place where it’s unlikely to hide

anything, such as the bottom right corner of their screen—to do that, just check the “Anchor” checkbox, then

drag the Results box to the desired place.

Below are other frequent punctuation marks—you may want to say them out loud once before the next

exercise. Note in particular the ellipsis and the difference between dash and hyphen.

Remember that you can use the Vocabulary Editor to see punctuation and symbols with their existing spoken

forms, as well as to add your own spoken forms, and to modify properties (such as “having no following space”

like the open quote.)

“ open quote

” close quote

( open paren or open parenthesis

) close paren or close parenthesis

… ellipsis

& ampersand or and sign

-- dash

- hyphen

TIPS for HYPHENS

You don’t always have to say hyphens: thanks to its built-in Vocabulary, Dragon is able to include hyphens

when you say items like 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 misrecognitions 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…

TIP When one turns the microphone off, Dragon may still be working on the last sounds it heard. Be patient—

remember, the microphone toggles on and off, so pressing the microphone hotkey again would actually tell

Dragon “wake up”.

Key points for your first dictation:

9 What you dictate is transcribed at the insertion point (the blinking vertical bar) after appearing briefly

in the Results Box (to anchor this box or set it to hide after a certain time, see Tools> Options> View.)

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

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

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

9 Two very frequent dictation commands are new paragraph (which creates a blank line) and new line.

9 By default, new line does not trigger capitalization of the following word; you can change that via the

Vocabulary Editor’s Properties dialog.

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