C H A P T E R 1 3
Improving Accuracy
Dragon NaturallySpeaking User’s Guide
180
■
have the fastest available processor in your computer,
■
have at least 256 MB of RAM,
■
have a hard disk with enough free space,
■
work in a quiet room,
■
have no radio interference or electrical noise from power lines.
Many of these conditions are impossible to achieve. No voice, for
example, always sounds the same and no microphone reproduces sounds
100 percent accurately. Other items are impractical or unlikely to be
available at the same time.
Some practical ways to improve
accuracy
Speak clearly
Speaking clearly and articulating each word is essential to getting a high
level of accuracy. The truism “garbage in, garbage out” applies here.
The clearer your speech, the better Dragon NaturallySpeaking
®
will
guess what you said. If you mumble and slur your words, you’ll get many
errors. (See “Speaking and Dictating” on page 153.)
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 165.
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 18.
