C H A P T E R
Dragon NaturallySpeaking User’s Guide
7
2
Using Dragon
NaturallySpeaking
Successfully
f you followed the exercises in your Dragon NaturallySpeaking Quick
Start booklet, by now you’ve had a chance to try dictating with
Dragon NaturallySpeaking. So, are you ready to throw away your
keyboard? Probably not. Chances are there are more mistakes in your
document than you’d like to see.
Why does the program make mistakes, and what can be done so it makes
them less often? This chapter provides some background information to
help you understand how Dragon NaturallySpeaking works. It then
reveals the “Seven habits for success with Dragon NaturallySpeaking,” a
list of tips and procedures you can follow to make the program recognize
your speech accurately.
How Dragon NaturallySpeaking
works
When you talk into the microphone, Dragon NaturallySpeaking doesn’t
hear words or phrases. The computer hears your speech as a continuous
stream of sounds. From this stream, Dragon NaturallySpeaking picks out
common sound patterns, known as phonemes.
To match these sound patterns to words, Dragon NaturallySpeaking
relies on two large sources of data: acoustical data and language data.
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