Finally! Someone has freed you from that medieval torture rack, the keyboard, and its contemporary accessory, the mouse. You’ve been muttering epithets at your computer. Now you can actually speak to it. Although it still won’t take your epithets to heart, it will now at least write them down for your future convenience.

For those who can’t type or spell (or at least, not well), and for those whose bodies have been punished by keyboarding, Dragon Professional Individual spells relief (and other words, too). Dragon Professional Individual gives your lips their job back: being your principal data output device. In fact, with Dragon Professional Individual, you may be able to type faster with your lips than with your fingers. At the same time, you can eliminate spelling errors (and spell checking) from your life. Yes, it’s true!

Dragon Professional Individual can do great things soon after you open the box, but too often, its talents lie hidden. Recognizing speech is one of those human talents that is still very complex to a computer. Recognizing human speech is as much a miracle for a computer as computing the precise value of pi is for a human. (Computing the highly abstract value of pie, oddly enough, is much easier for a human.)

Dragon Professional Individual borders on being miraculous, but to get really practical results, you have to meet this miracle halfway. Perhaps you have been wondering what all the excitement is about, either because you are thinking of getting Dragon Professional Individual or because, so far, Dragon Professional Individual hasn’t excited you. Dragon Professional Individual For Dummies is here to help.

About This Book

This book reveals the stuff you need to know to turn Dragon Professional Individual from a technical miracle into a working tool on your Windows computer. I also cover how to use Dragon Professional Individual on your smartphone and tablet. Following are a dozen things this book can help you do:

• Discover what Dragon Professional Individual can and can’t do.
• Help Dragon Professional Individual to recognize your voice.
• Run Dragon Professional Individual in the best way for your application.
• Use voice commands to get the formatting you want.
• Correct Dragon Professional Individual when it makes a mistake.
• Add to or customize Dragon Professional Individual’s vocabulary.
• Speak better for better recognition.
• Control your desktop by voice.
• Transcribe speech from a portable recorder.
• Use Playback and text-to-speech tools to help proofread.
• Choose hardware for better performance.
• Create your own dictation shortcuts and custom commands.

Conventions Used in This Book

Ever try to describe something basically simple and discover that the description made it ridiculously complex instead? Well, it’s that way with describing Dragon Professional Individual commands, so I try to simplify the job by using some typographic conventions. You won’t really need to think about the typography much (let alone go to any conventions about it), but in case you’re wondering about it, here’s what it means:

• I put Dragon Professional Individual commands (the ones you speak, not the menu choices) in bold and initial capitals, enclosed in quotation marks, such as “Scratch That.”
• When part of a Dragon Professional Individual command varies according to what you are trying to do, I indicate the variable part in angle brackets (<and>), as in: “Format That <font>.” The term <font> here represents one of the many fonts allowed by that command, like Arial.
• When part of a Dragon Professional Individual command is text from an example I discuss, I put that part in italics. For example, “Select we put that part” is a command telling Dragon Professional Individual to select the text “we put that part.”
• Where I want you to pause slightly in a command, I put a comma where the pause should be. For instance, if I tell you to say, “Caps On, The Sands of Barcelona, Caps Off,” I want you to pause briefly where those commas appear.

Foolish Assumptions

I think you are a person of elevated literary taste and acute discernment, who aspires to converse with computers. Beyond that, I assume certain things about you, my esteemed reader.

I assume you are a new user of Dragon Professional Individual. I also assume you are passably familiar with Microsoft Windows.

I figure you are picking up this book for any of the following reasons:

• You have installed Dragon Professional Individual and are baffled by it.
• You are impressed by Dragon Professional Individual but wonder if you are getting the full benefit of it.
• You’d like Dragon Professional Individual to work more accurately.
• You can’t get all the Dragon Professional Individual features to work.
• Dragon Professional Individual works, but not consistently.
• You don’t have Dragon Professional Individual, and are wondering if you would like it.

Icons Used in This Book

Like a Dairy Queen ice-cream Blizzard, For Dummies books are packed full of cool, crunchy tidbits. Accordingly, you’ll find the text studded with attractive two-color icons, pointing out tips, warnings, reminders, and the like. (Yes, of course, black and white are colors!) Here are the icons you’ll find:

Tips are insights and shortcuts that make your life easier, your wit sharper, and your hair more silky and manageable.

You don’t have to read paragraphs marked with Technical Stuff, but you’ll be a finer, more moral person if you do.

I used to know what this icon was for, but I forget. Oh! It notes a topic that I mention and that you should remember.

This icon marks things that are likely to blow up in your face or at least may cause problems if you don’t heed the warning.

Beyond the Book

I’ve provided additional information about Dragon Professional Individual online to help you on your way:

• Cheat Sheet: Check out www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/dragonprofessionalindividual to learn how to start dictation, use punctuation, correct dictation, get help, and use Dragon with other applications.
• Online articles: On several of the pages that open each of this book’s Part pages, you’ll find links to what the folks at For Dummies call Web Extras, which expand on some concept I’ve discussed in that particular section. You can find them at www.dummies.com/extras/dragonprofessionalindividual.

Where to Go from Here

The next step depends on what you need right now. If you’re stuck on a particular aspect of Dragon Professional Individual right now, look it up in the index and turn straight to that topic. If you are a newbie, why not just turn this page?

Let’s get started!