Skip to main content

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Quick Tips: Learn the Military Alphabet



Sometimes while using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you may need to spell out a word or may need to dictate an abbreviation

 In those cases, you will need to spell out the letters after switching Dragon into the spell mode. Since speech recognition programs often understand the spoken word from the surrounding context, their accuracy reduces when the user is spelling out the letters separately. Additionally, Dragon may find it difficult to interpret similar sounding letters. For example, for me, 'P' and 'T' are not properly interpreted. So instead of just saying the letters, I say the military equivalent  (i.e. the NATO alphabet) which is 'Papa' for P and 'Tango' for 'T'

Memorising the military alphabet will greatly improve your productivity. At the very least, you should learn the military alphabet equivalent of similar sounding letters.You can draw a list of the letters that you have trouble making Dragon recognise and then learn the military equivalent of that.

Initially, I had found it useful to take a printout of the  NATO alphabet and paste it near the monitor. It took me about a month and a half to memorise and use it without having to pause and remember the right word to use. An added bonus was that I was able to spell out any words clearly when I was giving my personal details like address et cetera over the phone.

I hope this helps you become faster at using Dragon Naturally Speaking.

If you have any tips to share, do share it in the comments section below.

About Dragon NaturallySpeaking:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the most popular speech recognition software on PC. Dragon Dictate / Dragon For Mac is the counterpart of Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Apple Macintosh computers.

Windows:
At the time of writing this blog post, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional Individual 15 is the recommended version for most users. However, I continue to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking premium 13) (approximately $100) because of version 15 incompatibility with Natlink. If your needs are limited to email and web surfing, then you may just want to purchase Dragon naturally speaking home 13 (about $ 50) .

Mac:
Dragon professional for Mac is the recommended version (costs around $ 300) .

You can download the appropriate version directly from the company's web store from the links below. (They usually run discounts once every month  so you can be on the lookout for the deals from the online store and purchase accordingly)



  Dragon for Mac 5

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reduce finger, wrist and forearm pain due to computer mouse usage with Gentle Mouse

If you are reading this on a computer screen, chances are that you would have clicked your mouse at least a couple of times to navigate through this content. And in most cases, the finger used to click would be your index finger. Now imagine doing this repetitive movement every few minutes, day after day, year after year and you can easily infer that your fingers are at an increased risk of repetitive stress injury (or RSI) due to mouse overuse. The common name given to this painful condition is  Mouse Finger .  The 'Finger' in Mouse Finger usually leads a person to believe that the pain is restricted to the fingers alone.  However, from what I have surmised after reviewing anecdotal evidence and medical literature, it commonly presents as a cluster of symptoms in the finger, wrist and the forearm. Perhaps that explains why there are no easily available research studies pertaining to Mouse Finger alone. Most of the research studies consider these symptoms as a p...
4 comments
Read more

How US Tax Reform Affects Patients with Chronic Illness

It was messy, but it is finally done and over with! On December 22, 2017 the tax reform bill , or 'a giant tax cut ' as President Trump calls it, has finally been passed by both houses and has been signed into a law. It is not immediately obvious how the tax plan impacts patients with chronic illnesses. Views in the media are often tainted by the political prism through which the commentators tend to look at this issue. Plus there is limited discussion of the specific provisions that can affect patients with chronic illnesses. In this post, I am outlining some of the major provisions of the final bill that may affect chronically ill patients. Bear in mind that I am not a professional in accounting and taxation . However, I seem to have had more than my fair share of tax problems and as a result, I have become overfamiliar with the IRS website and publications. Article continues after the ad To make it easier to wrap our brains around this complex piece...
2 comments
Read more

Reduce RSI and chronic pain in your hands and fingers by using whatsapp with speech recognition

Whatsapp has emerged as a extremely popular form of communication in the last few years. In fact, even my doctors are using whatsapp to communicate with their patients. So even though I experience a lot of pain in operating mobile with hands , I am constrained to use whatsapp. A few months ago, after a bit of effort, I will able to figure out a way to use whatsapp hands-free with speech recognition. I'm still trying to find a way to use whatsapp with Dragon NaturallySpeaking on the desktop. Here are two videos that explain how to send and receive messages using whatsapp. As I explain in the videos, there are some shortcomings in both sending and receiving. For example, you cannot dictate more than approximately 200 characters while sending a message. And of course you cannot send a photograph or a video or share another message using speech recognition as yet. With receiving whatsapp messages, depending on your device,, you may have to hear all the unread messages multiple tim...
2 comments
Read more