C H A P T E R
Dragon NaturallySpeaking User’s Guide
161
13
Improving Accuracy
hen Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
recognizes your speech, it takes
its best guess at what you say and it will make some mistakes. But
you can take concrete steps toward improving your accuracy, which is
one of the most important factors in using the program productively.
A 90 percent accuracy rate means about 25 mistakes per page, while a 95
percent accuracy rate is around 13 mistakes per page. The 5 percent
difference in accuracy means just half the time spent correcting. Thus,
even a small improvement in accuracy can make Dragon
NaturallySpeaking
®
a more productive and useful tool.
For an easy and fast way to improve accuracy, see “One minute to fewer errors”
on page 165.
What level of accuracy you can expect depends on many variables,
including the speed of your computer, your sound hardware, the type of
text you dictate, and how clearly you speak. After you complete initial
training in Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
, the program should type at least
80 percent of your dictation accurately. As you use the program over
several weeks and correct mistakes in your documents, the software will
learn more about how you speak and its accuracy will improve. Most
people can achieve an accuracy rate of between 90 and 98 percent.
To check your accuracy, read some written text to Dragon
NaturallySpeaking
®
for two or three minutes. Count the number of
mistakes Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
made and divide this by the total
number of words you said. If, for example, Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
made 16 mistakes in 200 words, your error rate is 8 percent (16 divided
by 200). Your accuracy rate is 92 percent (184 correct words divided by
200). The error rate plus the accuracy rate totals 100 percent.
W
TIP
