Environment Matters

It is important to train your computer in the environment in which you will be using it or in one very similar. I didn't realize until recently how often I adjust my voice volume as I speak based on the background noise around me. When I do this, Dragon fails to understand what I am saying.

I began training Dragon at home in December '05. Home wasn't exactly a quiet environment at the time. My sister and her family were living with us so all together we had 8 people and three dogs. A lot of fun, but also a lot of noise. I figured that the noise wouldn't matter because the Sylencer mask cancels out background noise. I was correct that Dragon was able to train without being thrown off by the back ground noise, but what I didn't take into account is that I naturally spoke louder to compensate for the noise in the room. This didn't cause me any problems until I tried to voice write in the church setting.

Dragon is very sensitive. If one talks louder (or softer for that matter), it isn't able to make the necessary adjustments to compensate for the difference. When speaking too loudly, a red line will appear in the Volume Display box. It will show yellow when speaking too softly.

Though I am aware of this now, I still have difficulty making my volume match what is needed for Dragon to understand me when the volume in my environment changes. I find that during the music portion of the service I talk too loudly and during the sermon I talk too softly. To remedy this problem I have started doing all training in the church on Sunday mornings. That way I can get used to maintaining the same volume even with a changing background. Also, I am more naturally speaking the volume that matches the church setting.

After the service, I save the document with audio, then during the week make the necessary corrections. For a one hour service, it takes me about three hours to do corrections. I expect that time to go down each week since Dragon is learning from the corrections done before that.

(By the way, I purchased the Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred-Version 8 originally. It does not have the ability to save audio and train later. It is about $250 less, but I almost always found it necessary to make the necessary corrections later. Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional-Version 8 allows me to the save of audio for later training.)