C H A P T E R 1 3
Improving Accuracy
Dragon NaturallySpeaking User’s Guide
170
Retrain
People’s voices change on different days and even within the same day.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
matches your sounds to a computer model
of your voice. The more your voice sounds differently from the model,
the more mistakes the program will make. You can’t make your voice
sound the same all the time, but it can be helpful to make Dragon
NaturallySpeaking
®
adapt its acoustic model to the way your voice
sounds at any given time by performing additional training. See “One
minute to fewer errors,” on page 155.
Keep the microphone in the same position
Each time you use Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
, keep the microphone
the same distance from your mouth. To review microphone placement,
see “Audio Setup” on page 16.
If Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
adds unwanted short words to your
dictation (such as “a,” “in,” and “of”), the microphone may be picking
up your breathing. Move the microphone closer to the corner of your
mouth rather than in front of your mouth. If the microphone is already at
the corner of your mouth, move it about an inch farther away from your
face. Also, check that the microphone cord is not rustling against your
clothes.
Use a good microphone
All microphones distort the sound of your voice as it’s transmitted to the
computer, but some microphones work much better than others, and
some combinations of microphones and sound cards work better than
others. Some people get significantly better accuracy by switching to a
different microphone. For a list of microphones certified to work with
Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
, see the Web site listed on page 259.
Headset microphones tend to be more accurate than handheld
microphones, which tend to move around more relative to your mouth.
This makes your voice sound less consistent to Dragon
NaturallySpeaking
®
.
You might also try switching to a USB microphone. A USB microphone
includes its own sound hardware, bypassing your computer’s sound card.
