Top ways to improve accuracy

These are the best ways to optimize Dragon's ability to recognize your speech.

Dictate with care.
When you talk to people, you often hesitate, mumble, or leave words out, but others can still understand you. And in noisy environments, people can effectively separate the noise from speech. But speech software needs help understanding you. Try to speak at a consistent speed and volume - don't hesitate, don't exaggerate pronunciation, and don't talk loudly or slowly. Reduce background noise and keep your microphone about an inch from your mouth and to the side. Be sure to speak in complete phrases when dictating because Dragon relies on context when transcribing speech, using its knowledge of words that tend to appear together. Additionally, Dragon calculates how frequently you use words and phrases and can offer you suggestions when it makes mistakes. Try to think about your whole phrase or sentence before you start dictate it, and you'll be on your way to dictation mastery. For more information, see Dictation Basics.
Import lists of words or phrases Rather than adding words or phrases one at a time, you can import one or more lists. The lists can even include spoken forms. This method can be particularly useful for businesses that have a lot of people dictating similar names or words or if you need to use more than one user profile. For more information, see Import list of words or phrases dialog box.
Learn from specific documents You can select specific documents or entire folders containing typical documents, your own or those of others, that reflect the type of dictation you will typically do. You can then train Dragon how you pronounce unusual words or about proper names you need to dictate. For example, if you were an academic and ran the tool to add words from essays and articles in your field of study, or a blogger using a lot of new acronyms, Dragon would automatically learn your words, word frequency and contexts, and make better guesses about your speech. Dragon also moves words from its backup dictionary to its active vocabulary based on the scan. If there are a lot of words to train, you'll need to plan this activity when you have a few minutes to spend adding the words. . For more information, see Learn from specific documents.
Learn from sent e-mails Similar to Learn from specific documents, this tool helps refine your profile by analyzing representative text, only in this case it analyzes e-mail messages sent from your installed email program. In addition to analyzing frequency of word use and typical word sequences, it can suggest contact names you may want to add to the vocabulary. Note: For the first run, plan this activity when you can let Dragon use your computer for 5 to 30 minutes. Subsequent scans build on the first one, however, and are much faster. For more information, see .Learn from sent e-mails
Run Accuracy Tuning This process refines your user profile by analyzing audio and text data that Dragon archives from your dictation. You can launch Accuracy Tuning from the DragonBar Audio menu.
Perform additional training Dragon learns about how you pronounce words and your vocal tones when you create your user profile, but it can learn more if you read one or more of the supplied training texts. We recommend you read a training text after a few hours of using Dragon. On the DragonBar, select Audio > Read Text to Improve Accuracy.
Turn off what you don't use For example, you can turn off the ability to "voice-click" menus, buttons and other controls in some or all programs, or the ability to open items from the Windows Start menu or desktop. Turning off these options reduces Dragon's use of computer resources and reduces the possibility of isolated words or phrases being executed as commands, such as "Click Send" or "Open Network."
Use Smart Format Rules to have Dragon recognize when you change a custom or built-in auto-formatting option or word property for alphanumeric text or a word. Dragon automatically applies formatting to many common spoken forms of text, such as Web and e-mail addresses, street addresses, dates, numbers, units of measure, and so on. The Smart Format Rules feature recognizes your changes to rules and offers to customize the settings to suit your needs as you work. You can also add custom word properties to words to make Dragon's text entry more intuitive and efficient. By setting word properties, you specify a variety of options that can be associated with vocabulary entries. You can specify that a word be preceded or followed by specific characters and customize properties for placement or handling. For example, question marks and exclamation marks have default properties of "Precede by (nothing)" and "Format the next word capitalized."
Make corrections You can prevent many errors using the methods listed above, but if an error does happen, correcting it will help Dragon to learn. Rededicating or retyping words or phrases are sometimes the fastest approach, but Dragon provides a lot of flexibility about how and when you correct errors.
Save your user profile Remember that as Dragon works on your documents with you, it needs to save what it learns. After you correct dictation, train words, or perform any of the other accuracy optimization operations, save your profile to save your changes for your next session.