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Dragon Professional Individual For Dummies
Author:
Published:
January 5, 2016
Overview
Stop typing and get more done with Dragon Professional Individual voice recognition software
Tired of typing, but afraid to take the leap into voice recognition software? No problem! Dragon Professional Individual For Dummies, 5th Edition gives you a great overview of the industry-leading speech recognition software so you can start talking instead of typing in no time at all. With this easy-to-use guide, you'll quickly find out how to use Professional Individual to open documents, write emails and notes, update your Facebook status, and much more. The book includes everything you need to get started, from launching the software and basic dictating to controlling your desktop by voice, and tips for improving accuracy.
Available for both Windows and Mac, Dragon Professional Individual is the gold
standard for home and professional voice recognition software. Easy to use and much more efficient than typing, the software can take your productivity to the next level.
- Get an introduction to everything you'll need to know to get started with Dragon Professional Individual voice recognition software
- Find out how to access documents, write emails, and even update your Facebook status with nothing more than your voice
- Includes the most updated information on the latest version of the software
- Offers information for programmers and developers who want to use the software for mobile app development
Dragon Professional Individual For Dummies, 5th Edition is your go-to resource to get up and running with this great voice recognition software in no time.
Dragon Professional Individual puts you in control of your computer with the sound of your voice. You can dictate messages, browse the Web, and control popular applications. Here's the straight scoop to take charge of your system with Dragon Professional Individual.Starting to dictate with Dragon Professional IndividualAfter you have installed Dragon Professional Individual on a computer with all the necessary system requirements and performed the initial training, you’re on the road to a beautiful friendship with your assistant.
About The Author
Stephanie Diamond founded Digital Media Works, Inc., an online marketing company. She has more than 20 years of experience building profits for both small businesses and multibillion-dollar corporations in over 75 different industries.
Articles From The Book
3 results
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Articles
Here are ten common problems that Dragon Professional Individual users face. Problems are just part of the experience of owning something. And software problems . . . they are just part of the experience. Period.
Dictating but nothing happens
The words leave your mouth, but they don't appear on the screen. Say a few words into the microphone and see what happens.
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Here are ten things you'll want to know when using Dragon Professional Individual. Sometimes the difference between doing well and just getting by is a well-placed piece of advice.
Using hotkeys in dialog boxes
Hotkeys really shine in dialog boxes. The varied features of dialog boxes, the radio buttons, check boxes, and so on, respond unevenly to voice commands.
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The Dragon Professional Individual voice recognition software is amazingly accurate, but you can do these following things to improve its accuracy even more:
Have a habit of speaking too quickly? Think about slowing down before you speak and don't keep drinking more cups of coffee throughout the day.
Think about your overall speech pattern.
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Finding ways to save time — ways that don't take a lot of time to discover — is a lifesaver. Using the free download of the Dragon Go! voice recognition smartphone app, you have an instant answer to many of life's little questions. No big learning curve or training — just quick and easy. For example, here are five ways to save time at the office with Dragon Go!
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Dragon Professional Individual doesn't currently recognize all alternative spoken names for some symbols, but you can add them to the vocabulary. The period at the end of this sentence, for example, has more aliases (alternative names) than most criminals. The words period, decimal point, dot, point, stop, and full stop are all valid names for that same symbol in different contexts.
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If Dragon Professional Individual misinterprets lots of words, your second thought is probably, "Something's wrong with my microphone or sound card." (Your first thought is probably uncharitable toward your new assistant. Shame on you.)
Dragon Professional Individual may be messing up for lots of reasons, however.
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Dragon Professional Individual puts you in control of your computer with the sound of your voice. You can dictate messages, browse the Web, and control popular applications. Here's the straight scoop to take charge of your system with Dragon Professional Individual.Starting to dictate with Dragon Professional IndividualAfter you have installed Dragon Professional Individual on a computer with all the necessary system requirements and performed the initial training, you’re on the road to a beautiful friendship with your assistant.
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In Dragon Professional Individual, Nuance gives you some ways to identify commands. Because "What can I say" is context-sensitive, you will always see the commands that are helpful for the application you are in.
If Dragon Professional Individual isn't obeying your commands, it may not be recognizing your pronunciation.
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If you need help, you are never far away in Dragon Professional Individual with the DragonBar open. Here are some of the ways that you can find help directly from the DragonBar on your desktop:
Help menu: To reach Help files from the DragonBar, go to Help→Help Topics and type or say what you are looking for. For example, you can say, "Search Dragon help for .
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To add custom terms to the Dragon Professional Individual active vocabulary, click the Open the Vocabulary Editor link from the Accuracy Center (or you can launch the Vocabulary Editor by choosing Vocabulary→Open Vocabulary Editor from the DragonBar menu or speak the commands). Then follow these steps:
Enter the term in the Search For box at the top of the Vocabulary Editor.
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Normally, you use your own documents to teach Dragon Professional Individual about your vocabulary. What can you do, however, for a subject that you have not written much about?
Answer: Grab words from documents other people have written. The web, for example, is full of documents about nearly any subject you can name.
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Nuance has added a great new feature that will make you even more productive when using your Dragon Professional Individual commands. It's the ability to use a variable in your auto-text command.
So how can you use it? After you create a new command and dictate its contents so that you don't have to retype the same text over and over, you can put a variable in an auto-text command and use it on the fly.
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Dragon Professional Individual keeps a backup copy of each user's speech files. It automatically makes this copy every fifth time you save Dragon Professional Individual's speech files — which most people do when they are prompted to as they exit Dragon Professional Individual.
You can make this backup more or less frequent by using the Options dialog box.
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Analyzing emails is one way for your Dragon Professional Individual assistant to build your vocabulary. This process helps in two ways. It learns from the style of your emails and it can automatically add email addresses you currently use. It works with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook.com, Lotus Notes, Gmail, Yahoo!
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Changing any habit is hard, and speech is one of the most habitual activities. (Well, besides drinking coffee.) 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.
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When cloning commands, the Command Browser in Dragon Professional Individual is a bit different from the Command Editor. Instead of dictating information, you select the command name from a list. To launch the Command Browser, do the following:Choose Tools→Command Browser.You are presented with a big list of commands.
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When you create a command in Dragon Professional Individual, you have to decide what type of command it will be — Global, Application-specific, or Window-specific. But what if you are using a program that hasn't been introduced to your Dragon Professional Individual assistant?
You need to have them meet! That process is a snap.
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Nuance offers many ways to help you learn how to use Dragon Professional Individual. You can ask questions on the support portal, call tech support and speak to an expert, and search the Nuance Knowledgebase for answers.
Where to Find Nuance Communications, Inc.
To Contact Them
Try This
Customer Service (Phone)
800-654-1187
Technical Support (Online)
(Phone)
Create email account for support
770-702-6014
Headquarters Address
Phone
Fax
1 Wayside Road, Burlington, MA 01803
781-565-5000
781-565-5001
Web
www.
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If Dragon Professional Individual does something you really don't understand and have a tough time explaining, or if it does something seemingly simple but gives you no information to work with (like failing to install or refusing to respond), you need to talk to a tech support person on the phone.
To determine what you will pay and the parameters under which you may call, go to Online Support.
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If you're likely to use terms from some specialized vocabulary, you can make a list of such terms and give them to Dragon Professional Individual in one fell swoop. For example, Queen's Gambit Declined is the name of a chess opening.
Each of the three words is surely already in the Dragon Professional Individual General English vocabulary, but Dragon Professional Individual doesn't know that these three words have a special capitalization pattern when they appear together.
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You can insert a graphic in Dragon Professional Individual with a command. To get started, find a graphic that you want to insert into documents. This could be maps, scanned images, and so forth. For this example, a logo is used:
Copy your logo from your files using Windows, right-click Copy, or say, "Select That" and then say, "Copy That.
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Once you get into the heat of the working day, you'll probably have several applications open on your PC and others you want to open. You don't want to have to commit them to memory; just command them with your voice.
Here are some commands for navigating your applications once you have Dragon Professional Individual running and your microphone on:
The "List All Windows" command: If you want to see which applications are open already, say, "List All Windows.
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Practice makes perfect. When you first get started, you may be unclear about how to dictate add-in punctuation and formatting. As a test, try to speak the following dictation using the DragonPad with the punctuation and formatting you think you want. Then you can dictate it into Dragon Professional Individual.
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It can be amusing when you realize that your Dragon Professional Individual microphone has been on the entire time you took your last phone call. The words you dictated won't look anything like what you said. There are pauses; you looked away and probably had the microphone pushed down below your chin. Quickly delete your dictation and put it out of your mind after you stop laughing.
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If you can train yourself to do it, it's great to add punctuation with Dragon Professional Individual as you dictate. Here's how to insert common punctuation marks as you speak.
Punctuation Mark
Spoken Form
.
"Period" (or "Dot,"
or "Point")
!
"Exclamation Mark" (or
"Exclamation Point")
?
"Question Mark"
,
"Comma"
'
"Apostrophe"
's
"Apostrophe Ess"
&
"Ampersand"
:
"Colon"
;
"Semicolon"
"
"Begin Quote"
"
"End Quote"
'
"Open Single Quote"
'
"Close Single Quote"
.
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When you dictate, make sure to correct the mistakes that Dragon Professional Individual makes so that your accuracy improves over time. Making quick corrections to your dictation will save you lots of time and help you avoid confusion. Here are some commands you can use to quickly correct your mistakes.
Say This
Do This
"Correct "
Select the text you want to correct.
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The Options and Formatting section of the Accuracy Center is key. It contains several ways for you to customize Dragon Professional Individual to make your assistant do things your way. Remember to revisit your Options settings periodically when you are using Dragon Professional Individual. You may want to alter the settings you chose when you first started.
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After you have installed Dragon Professional Individual on a computer with all the necessary system requirements and performed the initial training, you're on the road to a beautiful friendship with your assistant. Take the following steps.
Launch Professional Individual by Choosing Start→Programs→Dragon →Dragon.
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Through Internet media, you can find out what problems other users are having with Dragon Professional Individual; ask questions of your own; answer other users' questions; share experiences; commiserate; and speculate about the motivations, intelligence, and personal hygiene of the people who wrote whatever part of Dragon Professional Individual you're currently having trouble with.
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The first step controlling other applications with Dragon Professional Individual is to make the words you say appear in a window controlled by the other application. To get those first words to show up in the correct window, follow these steps:
Open Dragon Professional Individual and another application.
It doesn't matter whether you open Dragon Professional Individual or the other application first.
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Dragon Professional Individual understands only those who have officially introduced themselves as users and created a User Profile. Here are four reasons why you may want to make more than one User Profile for yourself:
You use different vocabularies or writing styles for different tasks.
You use different microphones for different tasks.