Chapter 4
In This Chapter
Dictating text and commands
Controlling the microphone
Reviewing tips for dictation
Punctuating and capitalizing
Entering spaces and tabs
Entering different numbers and dates
Making quick corrections
Tackling common dictation problems
It seems to me that dictating should be a far easier way to communicate than by tapping your fingers across a keyboard. And the basics of dictating are, in fact, pretty easy. You just need to know a few tricks that I tell you about in this chapter.
The “basics” of Dragon Professional Individual are its keyboard-like capabilities to turn voice into text. Dragon Professional Individual can do lots of other things (edit, format, make tables, launch programs, and more) too, but those tasks are covered in later chapters. The keyboard-like features are the ones you find in all versions of Dragon.
Chapter 5 goes into detail about correcting errors, moving your cursor around verbally, and other fine points of editing using Dragon Professional Individual. Chapter 5 also discusses some of the more advanced editing features Dragon Professional Individual offers in certain applications. For now, I focus on basic dictation in Dragon Professional Individual.
After you have installed Dragon Professional Individual on a computer with all the necessary system requirements (see Chapter 2), you’re on the road to a beautiful friendship with your assistant. Open the program into which you’d like to dictate and take the following steps:
Launch Dragon Professional Individual. Choose Start ⇒ Programs ⇒ Dragon.
You can use Dragon Professional Individual with a large number of applications. If you intend to use Dragon Professional Individual with another application, launch that application at this point, too.
Put on your headset, and make sure the microphone is positioned as it was during initial training.
The microphone should be positioned about a half-inch away from one corner of your mouth, off to the side. It should never be directly in front of your mouth.
Turn the microphone on.
The microphone icon on the DragonBar needs to be green in order for you to dictate. If the icon is red, click it or press the + key on your keyboard’s numeric keypad to turn it green, as shown in Figure 4-1.
The microphone icon in the toolbar of the Dragon Professional Individual DragonBar works exactly the same way as the icon in the system tray. Make sure one of these is open and ready for you to dictate.
Click where you want the text to go if the cursor isn’t already there.
Or select (highlight) the text that you want to replace with dictated text.
Speak carefully, just as you did when you read the text aloud to Dragon Professional Individual during the initial setup. Don’t rush, and don’t speak the words with … spaces … between … them.
As you speak, Dragon Professional Individual shows you what it thinks you said.
Speak your punctuation, such as “Period” or “Comma,” as you go, and if you want a word capitalized, say the word “Cap” beforehand.
However, you don’t need to say “Cap” if it is the first word of the sentence.
See the later section, “Punctuating and Capitalizing,” for details.
If Dragon Professional Individual makes errors (remember, it’s only up to 99 percent accurate), correct them rather than edit them. For basic instructions, see “Making Quick Corrections,” later in this chapter. See Chapter 5 for additional details on correcting and for instructions for editing by voice.
Figure 4-2 is an example of how dictation works in Dragon Professional Individual. These paragraphs show the basic keyboard-style input I discuss in this chapter.
Use your keyboard and your mouse just as you would normally — to type, make menu selections, or use command keys (like Ctrl+Z). Or you can use Dragon Professional Individual to perform keyboard and menu commands. See Chapter 15 for details.
Dragon Professional Individual lets you mix dictation (words that are converted into text) and commands (instructions to the computer). You don’t have to press or click anything to tell Dragon Professional Individual, “Here comes a command; don’t write this.” You just say the command.
Sometimes, however, you may not get what you expect. For instance, “Cap” is a command to capitalize the upcoming word. You may, however, dictate a sentence like, “We want to cap expenditures for this year” and see it come out like this: “We want to Expenditures for this year.”
Use pauses to control the interpretation. Most commands involve two or more words. Dragon Professional Individual must hear them together, as a phrase, to interpret them as a command. To make sure Dragon Professional Individual interprets a phrase as text instead of a command, pause between two or more of the words.
To have Dragon Professional Individual interpret “cap” as text, for instance, pause between “cap” and the word it operates on, like “expenditure.” For a two- or three-word phrase that sounds like a command (like “Caps On”), pause between the words to break up the phrase (“They put their caps … on their heads.”) You also need to pause before commands that affect what you just said, as “Scratch That” does, undoing your preceding action. If you don’t pause, Dragon Professional Individual will lump “scratch” with the preceding word and consider it all as text. Fortunately, such a pause is natural.
Most people aren’t that careful. They speak the phrase and then say, “Oh, rats” (silently, to themselves, or else Dragon Professional Individual will dutifully type that out). Instead of “Oh, rats,” when you see the error, say, “Scratch That” to remove the blooper. Then repeat the phrase with the pauses adjusted. Don’t worry; this isn’t as complicated as it sounds. It becomes quite natural.
Pausing doesn’t help with punctuation and numbers that you want spelled out. For instance, you can’t dictate, “He typed a comma and continued.” You get the comma symbol, not the word. For those problems, use the Vocabulary Editor (described in Chapter 17) to add the written word comma with a new spoken form (for example, “word comma”). Then you can say, “He typed a word comma and continued.”
Some people switch the microphone off and on to avoid inserting the garbage text that comes from coughing, sneezing, or answering the phone. Dragon Professional Individual gives you several ways to control the microphone:
Dictating text, especially if you’re used to typing on a keyboard, can seem a little clumsy at first. You need to do things a bit differently than when you type. Following are eight tips to make your dictating easier:
Proofread what you have dictated. Dragon Professional Individual will make some mistakes, particularly when you first get started. Sometimes those mistakes are both potentially embarrassing and so plausible-sounding that they are hard to detect! Dragon Professional Individual provides two tools that address this problem:
See Chapter 7 for more information on these proofreading features.
Dictating isn’t quite like speaking. Unlike human listeners, Dragon Professional Individual can’t interpret the inflections and pauses in your voice as punctuation. When you dictate, you have to make an effort to help Dragon Professional Individual out, although Dragon Professional Individual does do some punctuating and capitalizing automatically. Here’s how to work with Dragon Professional Individual to get your words correctly capitalized and your apostrophizing properly punctuated.
Speaking punctuation marks as you dictate is annoying but necessary if you want to avoid the tedious process of going back and inserting punctuation. Tables 4-1, 4-2, and 4-3 show you what words to say to insert punctuation marks as you speak.
Table 4-1 Single Punctuation Marks
Punctuation Mark |
Spoken Form |
. |
“Period” (or “Dot,” or “Point”) |
! |
“Exclamation Mark” (or “Exclamation Point”) |
? |
“Question Mark” |
, |
“Comma” |
' |
“Apostrophe” |
‘s |
“Apostrophe Ess” |
& |
“Ampersand” |
: |
“Colon” |
; |
“Semicolon” |
‘ |
“Open Single Quote” |
' |
“Close Single Quote” |
… |
“Ellipsis” |
$ |
“Dollar Sign” |
- |
“Hyphen” |
-- |
“Dash” |
Table 4-2 Paired Punctuation Marks
Punctuation Mark |
Spoken Form |
“ |
“Open Quote” |
" |
“Close Quote” |
( |
“Open” (or “Left”) “Parenthesis” (or “Paren”) |
) |
“Close” (or “Right”) “Parenthesis” (or “Paren”) |
[ |
“Open Bracket” |
] |
“Close Bracket” |
Table 4-3 Math and Computer Symbols
Punctuation Mark |
Spoken Form |
{ |
“Open Brace” |
} |
“Close Brace” |
/ |
“Slash” |
“Backslash” |
|
@ |
“At Sign” |
~ |
“Tilde” |
_ |
“Underscore” |
* |
“Asterisk” |
> |
“Greater Than Sign” (or “Open Angle Bracket”) |
< |
“Less Than Sign” (or “Close Angle Bracket”) |
| |
“Vertical Bar” |
# |
“Pound Sign” (or “Number Sign”) |
- |
“Minus Sign” |
+ |
“Plus Sign” |
. |
“Point” |
% |
“Percent Sign” |
` |
“Backquote” |
, |
“Numeric Comma” |
^ |
“Caret” |
If you’d like to wade slowly into the process of speaking punctuation, you’ll be happy to know that Dragon Professional Individual provides a function called Natural Punctuation, which automatically adds periods and commas where Dragon thinks they should go. If you start a new line or a new paragraph or come to what Dragon Professional Individual thinks is the end of a sentence based on your pause, it will add a period. Choose DragonBar ⇒ Tools ⇒ Auto-Formatting Options and select the check box that says Automatically Add Commas and Periods to turn that feature on.
This doesn’t prevent you from saying “period” or “comma,” but if you forget or are new to the process, you have a backup. Remember that it won’t add any punctuation other than periods and commas. You still need to say them. (See preceding tables for punctuation you can use.)
Dragon Professional Individual does some capitalization for you, as you dictate. For example, it generally capitalizes the first letter of a sentence. (Its cue to capitalize is that you have started a new paragraph or punctuated the end of a sentence.) It also capitalizes words that it thinks are proper nouns or that it has been taught to capitalize in its vocabulary training or editing. In general, as long as you don’t do any manual typing between finishing one sentence and starting the next, Dragon Professional Individual automatically takes care of the initial capitalization.
When Dragon Professional Individual doesn’t capitalize for you, you have several ways to capitalize words yourself. The two best and easiest ways to capitalize are either before you speak a word or phrase or immediately afterward.
You can also select any text with your mouse or by voice and then apply capitalization and other formatting. See Chapter 5 for more about that technique.
Here are the basics of capitalizing the initial letters of words:
Table 4-4 lists all the various ways to capitalize.
Table 4-4 Capital Ideas
To Do This |
Example |
Say This |
Capitalize the first letter of a word. |
Like This |
“Cap <word>,” or “<phrase > Cap That,” or “Caps On <one or more phrases > Caps Off” |
Capitalize all letters in a word. |
LIKE THIS |
Use any of the same three preceding approaches for first-letter capitals, but say, “All Caps” in place of “Caps.” |
Use all lowercase letters in a word. |
like this |
Use any of the same three approaches, but say, “No Caps” in place of “Caps.” |
Capitalize something already dictated. |
Like This |
“Capitalize <xyz >” |
Understanding a letter or other document depends not only on the words but on the spaces between the words as well. Getting your document spaced out is relatively easy. Dragon Professional Individual automatically does some word, sentence, and paragraph spacing. You can control that spacing, or add space of your own.
Dragon Professional Individual has two commands that you can say to create the space that divides paragraphs: “New Paragraph” and “New Line.” What’s the difference?
Dragon’s way of doing the “New Paragraph” command might cause a problem for you if you are going to use any kind of paragraph formatting (such as bullets or, in Word, paragraph spacing). It’s better to use the “New Line” command instead. Otherwise, in many instances, you double the effect of the paragraph formatting: You get two bullets or twice the spacing you intended, for example.
Dragon Professional Individual does a pretty good job of automatic spacing. It usually deals with spaces around punctuation in the way that you want it to. Occasionally, however, you will want to add a few spaces or a Tab character in your text.
Dragon Professional Individual automatically puts spaces between your words. It looks at your punctuation to figure out the rest of the spacing. If, for some reason, you don’t want spaces between your words, speak the command “No-Space On,” speak your words, and then say, “No-Space Off.” Or if you anticipate that Dragon Professional Individual is about to precede your next word with a space that you don’t want, say, “No-Space” and then your next word, with no pauses between.
Dragon Professional Individual does different amounts of spacing after other punctuation marks. It is done in a way that usually works. For instance, Dragon Professional Individual puts one space after a comma, unless that comma is part of a number, such as 12,000 (whether spoken as “Twelve thousand” or “Twelve comma zero zero zero”). Dragon Professional Individual also offers a so-called “numeric comma” that’s never followed by a space. You can find these choices by going to Tools ⇒ Auto-Formatting Options.
The quickest way to add a space is to say the word “Spacebar.” For a tab character, say, “Tab Key.” Just as Dragon Professional Individual does for “Comma” or “Period,” it accepts these words or phrases as a character that it should type.
Another way to do the same thing is to say, “Press Spacebar” or “Press Tab.” In fact, you can tell Dragon Professional Individual to press any key on the keyboard by saying the word “Press” and then the name of the key. So, to press the spacebar, you can say, “Press Spacebar.” Or to press the F1 key, you say, “Press F1.”
When should you use “Press Spacebar” or “Press Tab”? If you sometimes write about the keyboard, you may end up training Dragon Professional Individual to type out the word spacebar or tab when you speak it, instead of inserting a space character. Sometimes, you may need to use the word tab in other contexts. (For example, “Run me a tab.”) In that event, the “Press” command will be the more reliable way to get a space or tab character.
When people speak about numbers and dates, they use so many different forms that it’s remarkable that a software program can actually figure them out. Yet, Dragon Professional Individual can do it. You can say, “Eight o’clock AM” and Dragon Professional Individual types 8:00 AM. Or you can say, “Forty-five dollars” and Dragon Professional Individual types $45.
Most of the time, Dragon Professional Individual types numbers and dates just the way you want it to, without doing anything special. The most common correction that you’ll have to do is tell Dragon Professional Individual to use numerals rather than words for digits zero through nine. To do so, say, “Numeral” before speaking the digit. Table 4-5 lists some of the ways you can say numbers and dates.
Table 4-5 Numbers and Dates
To Get |
Say |
.5 |
“Point” (or “Period” or “Dot”) “Five” |
0.45 |
“Zero point four five” or “oh point four five” |
One |
“One” |
1 |
“Numeral one” |
42 |
“Forty two” or “Four two” |
192 |
“One ninety two,” “One nine two,” or “one hundred (and) ninety-two” |
4627 |
“Four thousand six hundred (and) twenty seven,” “forty-six hundred twenty-seven,” or “four six two seven” |
4,627 |
“Four comma six hundred (and) twenty seven” or “four comma six two seven” |
$152.07 |
“One hundred fifty-two dollars and seven cents” or “dollar sign one five two point zero seven” |
Aug. 28, 1945 |
“August twenty-eight comma nineteen forty-five” |
May 11, 2010 |
“May eleven comma two thousand (and) ten” |
2:12 p.m. |
“Two twelve pee em” |
7:00 a.m. |
“Seven o’clock ay em” |
V |
“Roman numeral five” |
XLV |
“Roman numeral forty five” |
842-8996 |
“Eight four two hyphen eight nine nine six” |
Although making corrections technically falls into the editing category, and editing is discussed in Chapter 5, you usually want to make a few corrections the instant you see an error. Errors fall into two categories:
You deal with those errors in two different ways: scratching and correcting. Read on!
Making a verbal “blooper” is easy to do with speech input. You call across the office to someone or mutter something sarcastic, and Dragon Professional Individual dutifully types it. If you make a mistake verbally, however, you can also undo it verbally. (On the other hand, if Dragon Professional Individual, not you, makes the mistake, you should “correct” Dragon Professional Individual, not undo the mistake. See the upcoming section for details.) The two verbal commands that are most useful for undoing your bloopers are these:
The Dragon Professional Individual command for undoing your bloopers is “Scratch That.” To use the command, you must not have edited anything with your mouse and keyboard since you last spoke. The command will undo up to ten consecutive utterances, up to the last break in your dictation (where you did some keyboard work).
Of course, nothing says that you have to use Dragon Professional Individual to undo your bloopers. You can use your keyboard or mouse (press Ctrl+Z, for example, press the Backspace key, or select the text and press the Delete key) just as you would if you had typed the mistake.
If physically pressing the Backspace or Delete key isn’t an option for you, here are two verbal commands you can use for the same purpose:
Tripping over your tongue is easy when dictating. Also, composing sentences on the fly isn’t easy, and sometimes you want to change your mind about the phrase you just used.
You can solve both problems (misspeaking and changing your mind) with the “Resume With <word>” command. For <word>, substitute the word you want Dragon Professional Individual to back up to. That word must be within the last 100 characters you have dictated, and you must have dictated continuously (typed or edited nothing by hand) since that word.
For instance, following is dictation where someone makes an error in the first line, gives a correction using “Resume With,” and completes the phrase correctly:
The resulting text is Getting my tongue tangled up.
This command is particularly useful when you dictate into a portable recorder. See Chapter 11 for more about using commands when you dictate into a recorder.
If Dragon Professional Individual has misinterpreted something that you said, you can fix that mistake and help train your Dragon Professional Individual assistant. To accomplish this, you have to correct the error rather than just typing in the correct text, scratching the error, or undoing it. What’s the difference?
In Dragon terms, correcting something means to tell Dragon Professional Individual what you actually said rather than merely editing the text in the document. When you correct an error, you not only fix the resulting text, but you also educate your Dragon Professional Individual assistant to understand your individual speech habits. Correction is one of the main ways in which Dragon Professional Individual gets better over time. Don’t shortchange your assistant by not correcting it.
I describe all the different ways of correcting Dragon Professional Individual in Chapter 5, but here are two easily remembered ways using the command “Correct That”:
This second way of correction works only in the Dragon Professional Individual window and in what are called “Full Text Control” applications. In other applications, you select the text, and then you must speak replacement text. If the new text is also erroneous, say, “Correct That.” See Chapter 8 for more tips on using Dragon Professional Individual with other applications.
When the Correction dialog box appears, it lists numbered alternatives. Verbally choose one of the alternatives by saying, “Choose <number >.” For instance, say, “Choose five.” This approach is my favorite. If none of the alternatives are correct, you may verbally spell out the replacement text.
Another way to handle it if none of the options are correct is to redictate what you meant to say. If you get that wrong, say “Spell That” and you can spell it out. When you use the Spelling Window, the word is added to the vocabulary for future use.
Following are some common problems users experience with dictation. You can fix many of them by using the Correction menu box, described earlier in this chapter, or by word or vocabulary training (see Part IV for the details of vocabulary and word training):
[email protected]
,” much the way you would in conversation. To make sure everything is lowercase, say, “No Caps On,” then the email address, and then “No Caps Off.” For the address itself ([email protected]
, for instance), say, “person at company dot com.” If you are getting spaces within the name in the email address, you can also bring up the Spelling Window and add it there.http://www.company.com
) say, “http www dot <company> dot com,” saying nothing about the colon or slashes. Dragon Professional Individual adds the colon and slashes and recognizes the terms com, gov, mil, net, org, and sys just as you would normally say them. If you prefer, you can verbally spell out the letters in those terms.18.220.251.163