With Dragon NaturallySpeaking, saying “New Paragraph” gives two carriage returns and capitalises the first word whereas saying “New Line” gives one carriage return but doesn’t capitalise the first word.
But what if you always wanted to capitalise the first word after saying “New Line” – this is how you would do it.
On the Dragon menu, click on “Words” followed by “View/Edit”
Select the entry “New Line” and click on the “Properties” tab
Change “Format the next word” from “with normal capitalization” to “capitalized” as in the next screen
It can be extremely worthwhile running the Acoustic and Language Model tool in Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a regular basis. This is a valuable tool to increase your accuracy from your cumulative corrections (as long as you have diligently been using Dragon to make corrections that is!)
What is this tool and what does it do?
The Acoustic and Language Model Optimizer can automatically “tune” Dragon by making it review all the acoustic data and/or text data it has gathered from your usage. You may wish to run it after a few weeks of using Dragon regularly, and subsequently about once a month or even more often.
This Optimization can be launched at any time from the Accuracy Centre. It can also be scheduled so that Dragon performs it at a specific frequency and time.
You can do this manually or for convenience, Dragon lets you schedule a specific time and frequency for these optimizations.
To launch the Acoustic and/or Language Model Optimization manually:-
Step 1: In the Accuracy Centre, use the link “Run the Acoustic and Language Model Optimizer” Step 2: Check the Acoustic or Language Model checkbox as desired, then click Go. (As the dialog box mentions, you should run this tool when your PC is not being used actively.)
To set up an automatic schedule:-
Step 1: In the Accuracy Centre, use the link “Schedule Acoustic and Language Model Optimizer to run later”. This opens the Accoustic and Language Model Optimizer Scheduler. Step 2: Select the user profile from the list of profiles presented Step 3: Go to the menu bar and click on “File” followed by “New Task” – you will be prompted for your Windows user name and password Step 4: Follow the prompts to enter the time for optimization to take place. Choose a convenient time when you don’t actively use the PC e.g. I choose lunch time
Nuance have updated their website with some extremely useful resources which can help you better use Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
This page hosts the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 end-user workbook, a section on customising the Dragon NaturallySpeaking vocabulary and a “cheat sheet” of key tips and commands.
This page hosts the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 user guide. Each section is available in document form as well as a playable recording (wav file).
It’s well worth printing out and reading these resources in detail.
When using Dragon NaturallySpeaking in both Microsoft Excel 2003 and 2007:-
To select 2 adjacent cells, select the first cell and then say “press shift Right Arrow “
To select 2 adjacent cells in the next row, you would then say “press shift down arrow”
To select a group of cells – say I wanted to select cells A2 to E6 in the following example:-
The command would be “select cell A2 to cell E6” or “select cell A2 through cell E6” or better still, use the international communications alphabet and say “select cell alpha two to cell echo 6”
If you want to practise using this command, I’d suggest writing the command down beforehand to read from as it can be a bit of a tongue twister!
