Chapter 16

Speaking More Clearly

In This Chapter

Deciding what speech issues to worry about

Doing what NaturallySpeaking needs for clarity

Improving enunciation

Differentiating words

Knowing when to run the microphone check again

Deciding on additional training

Say, “I want a Fig Newton and a glass of milk.” Go ahead. Say it the casual way you would in a diner. (Presuming, for the moment, that you like Fig Newtons and milk.)

If you’re like me, you probably said something like, “Eyewanna FigNew’n ‘na glassa milk.” You probably skip the final “t” of “want” and slur “want a” (“wanna”), omit the “to” of “Newton,” skip the “a” and “d” of “and” (“n”), and don’t really pronounce either letter in the word “of.”

North Americans commonly don’t waste time or effort. Often, we ignore short words, initial vowels, and the final consonants of many words. And we unnerstan ‘chother perfeckly, raht? Riot. So whah cain’t t’ dang computer unnerstan goodol ‘merican English?

Most Americans would understand the Fig Newton line perfectly because of our love affair with cookies and milk. The computer, on the other hand, is rarely fed Fig Newtons and milk, except for what you drop into the keyboard or what your kids stuff into the DVD drive for the dog to lick out. The result? A computer relies on all those little things you normally skip but that distinguish one word from another. Without them, Dragon NaturallySpeaking may translate the line something like, “I have Fig Newton awesome milk.” That translation may inspire a popular new dairy or fruit beverage, but it wouldn’t be exactly what you had in mind for your computer activity.

So, should you learn to speak better, or should you train your NaturallySpeaking assistant to love you just the way you are? As with most things in life, the answer is “yes” — to both questions.

Do You Need to Speak Better?

You probably do need to speak a bit better. Improving your speech habits is one of the best and cheapest ways to cut down on errors in NaturallySpeaking.

On the other hand, don’t go nuts. For instance, try to pronounce that example sentence about Fig Newtons without slurring any consonants or dropping any a’s. (Say, “I want a Fig Newton and a glass of milk,” being sure to speak all the underlined letters.)

Hard work, huh? You’d probably get tired of speaking like a BBC announcer after a very short while, or else develop an urge to go to cricket matches. Moreover, Dragon NaturallySpeaking still may not perform perfectly. For instance, you may get, “I want a Fig Newton in a glass of milk.” If you try too hard to enunciate phrases like “Fig Newton,” you get “Fig a Newton.” Go fig ewer.

So, the first question is: Should you try to speak better than you do normally? If you suspect that your speech is naturally a bit sloppy, or if you’ve never thought about it much, you probably should try to do better.

If you find yourself working too hard to get better accuracy, stop. You will get tired quickly, start making even more errors, and your NaturallySpeaking assistant will never learn to recognize your natural speech.

If you have an accent (and who doesn’t?), don’t worry much about it. NaturallySpeaking adapts to your accent during training. What it has most trouble adapting to is missing words and sounds. If your accent is particularly strong, certain words may sound like other words to NaturallySpeaking. (You can correct it using word training. See Chapter 17.)

If you aren’t sure you’d know good speech if you heard it, listen to some professional broadcast journalists on the radio or television. But listen to people hired specifically as news readers (as opposed to disk jockeys, “personalities,” and retired sports heroes now working as sportscasters). News readers — particularly news readers at larger radio stations or broadcasting companies — are hired partly for their careful speech.

If your speech is pretty clear, but you continue to get recognition errors, consider some of the other remedies in this Part of the book. Training (Chapter 17) and better audio input (Chapter 18) can make a big difference. For example, Figure 16-1 shows that the correct placement of the microphone is crucial for accuracy.

If NaturallySpeaking misrecognizes special phrases, words, or acronyms in your vocabulary, for instance, the solution is more likely to be training or vocabulary work than improving your speech.

How Do You Do It?

Changing any habit is hard, and speech is one of the most habitual activities any of us do. (Well, besides drinking coffee.) Apart from taking our thumbs out of our mouths, we’ve been talking the way we have since childhood. How does a person improve his or her speech? Following are some fairly painless tips for speaking better:

• Avoid skipping words. Speak every word, without fretting at first about the enunciation of the word itself. NaturallySpeaking relies on the adjoining words to help figure out a word. If you skip or slur words, NaturallySpeaking will make more mistakes.
• Speak long phrases or full sentences. The more words in an utterance, the better NaturallySpeaking can figure out your words from context.
• Make sure you pronounce even small words like “a” and “the.” If, like most people, you normally pronounce the word “a” as “uh,” keep doing so. Don’t switch to “ay,” as in “hay.”
• Avoid running words together. The tiny breaks between sounds help distinguish one word from another.
• Focus your effort on pronouncing words differently that should sound a little different, and which Dragon NaturallySpeaking may otherwise confuse. Trying to pronounce “hear” differently from “here,” for instance, won’t gain you much: They are supposed to sound alike. (They are homonyms.) Nor will you benefit from trying to pronounce the “t” in “exactly,” because that word won’t be confused easily with any other word, even if you pronounce it “zackly.” But pronouncing the “th” in the word “the” — even if you do it very lightly — will help NaturallySpeaking distinguish that word from the word “a.”
• Enunciate. If you’re speaking every word and still have problems, work on your enunciation of words themselves. Pay attention to how a word is spelled. Try to speak all the consonant and vowel sounds in a word, especially ones that begin and end the word — unless they make the word noticeably awkward or the word sounds wrong as a result. (“Psychology” comes to mind. Don’t pronounce the P, of course.)
• Position the microphone appropriately. If you’re getting small words in your text that you didn’t say, like “a” or “and,” the microphone may be picking up small puffs of breath. Try moving the microphone more to the side. Then run the microphone check by clicking the Audio button on the DragonBar. Select the Check Microphone option. You are forced to run both the volume and quality checks. (See Chapter 17.)
• Sit with good posture, not bent over. Relax. Breathe freely. Think peaceful thoughts. Visualize twirling stars. You are getting very sleepy… .
• Don’t speak too rapidly. You don’t have to speak slowly, but in today’s high-pressure environment, many people begin to sound like a chipmunk with a Starbucks habit.
• If your throat gets dry or scratchy, drink water or warm tea. (Creamy, cheesy, or overly sweet foods or drinks can goo up your throat. They can make you sound murky or cause you to clear your throat a lot.)
• Check your microphone. If your voice changes volume over time, and errors increase, run the microphone check process again (Audio⇒Check Microphone), choosing to adjust volume. If you have a cold or allergies, or any other long-term change to your voice, consider doing some more general training, discussed in Chapter 17.
• Speak the way you trained. When you trained NaturallySpeaking, you read text aloud. Use your reading-aloud voice when you dictate text for highest accuracy.
• Talk to a voice trainer or singing instructor. A single session with a professional can give you a lot of tips about speaking more clearly. Who knows, you may find a whole new career.

If all else fails and accuracy does not improve, consider choosing Audio⇒Reset Audio Calibration. This makes Dragon forget everything it learned about how you sound. It still knows what words you use and when, but it will need to relearn your unique voice characteristics.

Shouldn’t NaturallySpeaking Meet You Halfway?

Despite all the tips in this chapter for speaking better, NaturallySpeaking is pretty adaptable to a wide variety of speech habits. The only speech flaws that can’t be compensated for, in some way, are these two:

• Skipping or slurring words
• Pausing between each word (not using continuous speech)

Nearly every other speech peculiarity can be compensated for by training. On the other hand, it may take a lot of training, and maybe you can improve your speech, instead, with less effort. See Chapter 17 for more about word training, general training, and vocabulary work.

For instance, if NaturallySpeaking consistently gets the same word wrong, the problem may be that your pronunciation is a bit unusual. I, for instance, thought I heard a reference to a “9 o’clock chicken” when riding to the airport in New Zealand. I thought it was a colorful Kiwi phrase for a small commuter plane. The speaker was referring to a “check-in.” Chickens aside, rather than retrain yourself, you can word-train NaturallySpeaking, or enter a phonetic spelling for the “spoken form” of the word using the Vocabulary Editor. (Of course, if you say “chicken” for “check-in,” what will you say for “chicken”?)

For the most part, NaturallySpeaking is not sensitive to how fast you talk. But very rapid or slow speech may require adjusting NaturallySpeaking settings for better accuracy. NaturallySpeaking looks for a pause as a cue that the next text may be a command. Normally it works best using a quarter-second (250-millisecond) pause, but you can adjust it. Choose Tools⇒Options, and then click the Commands tab. Drag the slider for Pause Required Before Commands to the right for longer pauses, left for shorter. If this setting is too short, words may get chopped up. If it is too long, NaturallySpeaking may translate commands as text.