In This Chapter

Dictating into any application

Using the Dictation Box for applications

Using Full Text Control applications

Using menus in other applications

You can get quite a bit done just by dictating into the Dragon Professional Individual Dictation Box and then using cut-and-paste techniques to move the text into documents belonging to other applications or by clicking the Transfer button in the Dictation Box. But you haven’t seen the full potential of Dragon Professional Individual until you’ve used it to dictate directly into other applications. At that point, Dragon Professional Individual becomes an essential component of your computer, like the keyboard and the mouse.

In this chapter, I focus on general techniques that you can use with many applications, using the Dictation Box and Full Text Control in the Dragon Professional Individual terminology. I tell you about the interactions you can expect in different sets of applications, plus the details. When you aren’t sure why something is working a certain way, you can turn here to at least find out how it should work.

The bottom line in using Dragon Professional Individual with other applications is that basic dictation works pretty much the same, but the capabilities to do other tasks vary. Nuance has a newly redesigned Dictation Box that makes it easy to use.

Finding Levels of Control

In addition to entering text into another application’s windows, Dragon Professional Individual voice commands can also control another application’s menus. When you combine these techniques with the desktop control commands and dialog box techniques described in Chapter 15, you get a true no-hands computer experience.

One of the most frequently asked questions about Dragon Professional Individual is, “Does it work with <name of application>?” The answer is yes. If the application has menus, dialog boxes, or a window into which you can type text, then you can use Dragon Professional Individual with it. The more interesting question isn’t whether Dragon Professional Individual voice commands work with some application, but which commands work with which applications.

Over the years, I’ve watched Dragon Professional Individual software evolve to the point where it’s sometimes hard for me to demonstrate a mistake. The out-of-the-box accuracy is truly stunning. The number of programs and apps available to dictate into has exploded as well. For this reason, I want to present you with a way of thinking about using other applications so that you know what to expect.

Dragon Professional Individual has different levels of control with different programs (on the web, as software, or as a mobile app). Commands that work in some applications don’t work in others. You’ll save yourself a lot of frustration if you understand the level of control you have in a particular type of application.

Table 8-1 summarizes these basic control levels:

• Desktop: Even if you have no applications other than Dragon Professional Individual open at all, you still have a few dictation powers:

  • Open files and applications on the desktop or the Start menu.
  • Switch from one open window to another.
  • Use the mouse commands.

  See Chapter 15 for details.

• Nearly Any Windows Application: You have all the desktop commands plus
  • Basic menu control
  • Dictation
  • Navigation

• The Dictation Box with another application: You retain all the desktop interactions. You can enter text by dictating. You can use the application’s hotkeys and menus. You can move around in a document by using the Move and Go commands. You have a limited amount of selection and correction capabilities.

  See “Creating Documents with the Dictation Box,” later in this chapter.

• Full Text Control: You have all the Dictation Box capabilities, plus the capability to create, edit, or format content. In other words, editing and correcting work exactly the way they do in the Dragon Professional Individual DragonPad.

  You can check if an application has Full Text Control by looking at the DragonBar and seeing if the circle at the end is green. If it is, you have Full Text Control. For example, if you use OpenOffice.org Writer, version 3.3 or 3.4, you have Full Text Control.

• Natural Language Commands: These allow you to speak commands in a more natural way. For example, rather than having to say, “Click File; Click Save As,” you can simply say, “Save Document.” You speak as you normally would. You have the full editing, correcting, and formatting control of the Dragon Professional Individual DragonPad, plus a Dragon Professional Individual menu is visible above the other application’s menu bar.

  Using this menu, you can do virtually anything that you can do with the DragonBar: Create a new user profile, launch Accuracy Tuning, check your microphone, and so on.

  This level is available in applications such as Microsoft Word 2010 and 2013, Internet Explorer 9 or higher, and current versions of Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Getting Started

You may already be comfortable dictating into the Dragon Professional Individual DragonPad, and you may have developed confidence that you can create documents there. If so, then you have already mastered the techniques that allow you to dictate to other applications. You just need to know which commands you can use in which situations.

If you aren’t already familiar with dictating in the Dragon Professional Individual Dictation Box, the next sections tell you what you need to know.

Dictating your first words

The first step in achieving dictation mastery of other applications is to make the words you say appear in a window controlled by the other application. (You can worry later about whether those words are correct or what you should do if they aren’t.)

To get those first words to show up in the correct window, do the following:

1. Open Dragon Professional Individual and another application.

   In the figures, I’m dictating into DragonPad, but you can use any application you want. It doesn’t matter whether you open Dragon Professional Individual or the other application first.

2. Click the microphone icon in the DragonBar to turn the microphone on.

   If the icon is green, the microphone is on; if the icon is red, the microphone is off. Change from one state to the other by clicking the microphone icon. By default, the microphone is off at startup.

3. Activate the window of the other application.

   • If the application is already opened but not visible, you can say, “List open applications.”

     A numbered list of open applications pops up. Choose the application you want.

   • If the application has not been opened, say, “Open <application name>.”

     The application should open and the cursor should be blinking in the text-editing window. If not, click in the text-editing window.

   In the open text window, I dictated, “Dear Betty, <New paragraph> We would like to issue congratulations to you and your dog Fluffy, for winning the gold medal at the big event this week. We know that you have worked hard. Period” The DragonPad window then looked like Figure 8-1.

If you aren’t going to use the Dragon Professional Individual DragonBar for a while, minimize it by clicking the DragonBar menu and choosing Tray Icon Only. A minimized window uses less of your computer’s resources for display and leaves more for the really important tasks, like figuring out what you just said. But don’t close the Dragon Professional Individual DragonBar. If you do, you’ll instantly lose your dictating capabilities.

Creating Documents with the Dictation Box

Wondering when to use the Dictation Box? Work at the Dictation Box level when you find you don’t have all the voice commands you normally use. For example, when I’m using the Snagit software, I don’t have access to all the commands, so I pop open the Dictation Box as shown in Figure 8-2. Use one of the methods described in the preceding section and see what happens.

In the sections that follow, I give you an idea of what kinds of actions you can take with the Dictation Box and tell you how to do them.

Using Full Text Control Applications

In some applications, Dragon Professional Individual gives you the capability to select, correct, or move the cursor to text in a document by saying the text. This capability is called Full Text Control, and the applications in which you have this capability are called Full Text Control applications.

Following are some applications that have the Full Text Control capability:

• Notepad
• WordPad
• Microsoft Word
• Outlook: When you use Word to edit Outlook’s email messages, the Word windows also use Full Text Control.
• Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome: Internet Explorer’s Full Text Control capability applies only to web pages that expect your input, such as online forms or web email interfaces.

The cut-and-paste commands like “Cut That” or “Copy That” work in some, but not all, Full Text Control applications. In the applications where they don’t work, you can easily accomplish the same purpose with menu commands. For example, use “Click Edit, Cut” instead of “Cut That.”

The formatting commands described in Chapter 6 all work in WordPad, but not in some of the other Full Text Control applications. (You wouldn’t expect them to work in Notepad, for example, because Notepad doesn’t allow formatting in any case.)

Dictation only works if Dragon Professional Individual is running. You can minimize the Dragon Professional Individual window while you dictate into another window, but if you close Dragon Professional Individual, you won’t be able to dictate.

Ordering from the Menu

The engineers at Nuance can’t anticipate every command that any stray application could possibly use, so they’ve done the next best thing: They made the “Click” command turn an application’s own menus into voice commands.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Say, “Click <menu name>” to expand a menu.

   Any title that appears on an application’s menu bar will work: “Click File,” “Click Edit,” and so on.

2. After the menu expands, say an entry on the menu.

   For example, after you say, “Click Edit,” you can say, “Paste” if Paste appears on the Edit menu. The result is the same as if you had chosen Edit ⇒ Paste.

Extending Posts to Facebook and Twitter

Generally, you can dictate into an application while running Dragon Professional Individual if you have an open text window. Using Dragon Professional Individual, you can use a special command that calls up a text window and posts directly into Twitter or Facebook. Following are three versions of a voice command you can use:

• “Post That to <Facebook/Twitter>”: Notice the use of the word that. In this version of the command, that refers to text you have already dictated and want to post on Facebook or Twitter. So, when you say this command, the text is in the box when the window opens.
• “Post to <Facebook/Twitter> <text>”: In this version of the command, the window opens and the text you uttered in the command is placed in the text window.
• “Post to <Facebook/Twitter>”: Using the command this way opens a blank text window for either Facebook or Twitter and then lets you dictate text.

If one of these preceding commands isn’t recognized, a blank window opens. You’ll have to dictate it again or cut and paste the dictation into the window.

You must give authorization for Dragon Professional Individual to post to your Facebook or Twitter account the first time you use this command (as shown in the following instructions). You are, of course, still subject to all the Twitter or Facebook restrictions on your account as you would normally be.

To use DragonPad to post to Twitter, use the following steps:

1. Open the DragonPad by saying, “Open DragonPad.”

   The DragonPad opens.

2. Dictate your message.

3. Once you have your message the way you want it, say, “Post that to Twitter.”

   A text window with the title “Post to Twitter” will open and your message will be in it, as shown in Figure 8-3.

4. Say, “Click OK.”

   An authorization window as shown in Figure 8-4 appears.

5. Dictate or type in your email and password.
6. Say, “Click Sign In,” and your message will be posted.