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Dragon NaturallySpeaking Tutorial: How To Control Microsoft Outlook with Your Voice




In this Dragon NaturallySpeaking tutorial, I will explain how you can compose and send an email hands-free in Microsoft Outlook using Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium version 13. However, this applies to other versions also including Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional version 15.

Sending and receiving emails is probably one of the most common tasks you will do.Dragon Naturally Speaking  is very well suited to accomplish. Typing long emails can be stressful to your hands. Using speech recognition along with ergonomic devices and posture correction can help reduce the risk of  chronic pain due to repetitive stress injury. For a complete beginner, as I was several years ago, it  takes some time to figure out the steps. So I have made cookbook style YouTube videos to explain this.

As a first step, you will probably like to put the email addresses of the recipients in the Microsoft Outlook contacts. The video below explains how to do this. As the video demonstrates, you would have to spell out the email addresses. This may be error prone because of similarly sounding letters but you can improve the accuracy by learning the military alphabet. If you have email addresses already in a notepad  or any other text editor which you may want to copy, you can refer to this post which describes how you can get this done quickly. A third way is to create a contact from an email that you have received from an unknown sender. There is an elegant way to do this and I will be describing it in a future blog post.





Once you have learnt how to enter the email recipient addresses, you can send the email using the video below.




The voice commands that you will use are very intuitive. Also, depending on the version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking that you choose and any third-party tools that may be installed, there will be multiple versions of voice commands that will achieve the same functionality. You can use the command that will fit your natural style of dictation and conversation. For example, I use the command "Send This Email" or "Click Send" interchangeably.

I hope the series of blog post will help you get started with Dragon NaturallySpeaking quickly. Please leave a comment below if there is any particular step that you get stuck on or if you would like to see tutorials on any particular functionality of using Microsoft Office with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
About Dragon NaturallySpeaking:



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




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