The Vocabulary Optimiser
A couple of days ago, I hit another plateau with regard to accuracy. Rather than try another training/dictation session, I decided that it might be time to rerun the Acoustic Optimiser as it had been around seven days – and a fair amount of intensive usage – since I had last run it. I also decided to try out the Vocabulary Optimiser, but, in my case, this proved a little bit more difficult than first appearances suggested.
As I understand it, the Vocabulary Optimiser works by analysing previously written documents and looking for commonly used phrases and words etc. In this way, Dragon builds up a personalised vocabulary that reflects the way the user normally builds up sentences – thereby, hopefully increasing accuracy. Unfortunately, the Vocabulary Optimiser can only analyse certain kinds of documents such as Microsoft Word documents, documents from Lotus Notes and documents in Rich Text Format. It can also analyse emails if you use Outlook.
I don’t.
I also don’t write a great deal in Word or in RTF format. The Vocabulary Optimiser can also analyse plain text documents but I don’t have a great number of those lying around either. Most of what I write ends up on a web page and HTML is one format that the Vocabulary Optimiser can’t handle. Of course, I could go around saving copies of all my web pages in plain text format for just this purpose but that is a very time-consuming task. Also potentially problematic for someone who is supposed to be resting her hands, yet still has problems navigating between applications using Dragon. In the end, I think I managed to save about a dozen pages in plain text. I did find one 55-page Word document but, apart from that (and some very boilerplate letters), drew pretty much of a blank on the MS Word front.
Nevertheless, I decided it was better than nothing , and fed what I could through the Vocabulary Optimiser as soon as the Acoustic Optimiser had finished.
Since then, I have noticed a slight increase in accuracy but I still feel that I’m having to correct too much. Maybe as much as 15 or 20%. I can only hope that this will reduce with time. One thing I have noticed, is that when I do correct a word or phrase, the chances of the correct wording appearing on the Correction menu have greatly increased. I’m not sure which of the two Optimisers is responsible for this – perhaps it was a combination of the two – but I’m very grateful. It helps to keep my frustration levels relatively low.
However, there are still some phrases that I simply cannot get right – the matter how many times I try to correct them. There are times when it is enough to convince me that there is an evil genius at work here. 