Jim Crafton wrote:
But doesn't it get better over time? Isn't that part of the "learning" or break-in period? Or is that just a lot of hype, i.e. that the Dragon system "learns" or gets better over time as it adjusts to your vocal patterns?
I think one of the biggest problems is the fact that many people use it in "basic" mode. I picked up dragon-preferred, the higher costing (but not highest) because of a couple of features. What is being referred to above is the context related pronunciation, though I have never seen it that bad, though I did just start using it yesterday morning full-out. For instance, my use of Topo orientation gets translated to "Topol orientaton" because it doesn't recognize the Topo as it is not a word, but an abbreviation for Topographic. Dragon preferred loves tech-speak, after training, but hates abbreviations. If you have written any documents, you can train dragon-preferred on startup using those documents. It uses the words as common usage counts to create context association. For instance "topographic engineering" occurs frequently together so has a high context association. But "topol graphic engine earing" has zero context association in my documentaton. Thus after dragon read every single paper I have ever written it knows I deal with engineering words rather than engine earing. Most people don't take the time to train any voice tool, they want to use it, and use it now. Even I skipped out of more than the basic training (first training lessons in both context, my writings, and the first voice lesson). I figured that was all that was needed to start it off, where I noticed it has problems understanding me, I can teach it specific lessons. So far this has worked exceptionally well. However, since I do give presentations, I have learned to speak distinctly and relatively smoothly with very few extra inflections to the words so as not to change the meanings unexpectedly. That minimal training took all of 10 minutes and was worth the time. Of course I do have a dual/dual processor in this machine so the reading of my documents was over in 5 minutes, but they warn may take as long as 30 minutes. Even so, grab a coffee, the context association counts are worth it. Of course the first lesson in voice training to dragon preferred explains all of this to you, you are actually reading the documentation that explains why you are training the computer and what benefits you will get out of it. Pretty smart if you ask me. But most p
