Nuance is offering something akin to a free beta trial of a future service that will enable users to have a Custom Vocabulary.  Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 already works to improve your vocabulary based on a generic model, making adjustments to your words as you use the program.

This would collect information on your vocabulary, send it to the Nuance -Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition labs (Picture doors that open when you tell them to) where they will custom tailor your new vocabulary profile. 

Overview

A new “custom vocabulary” service is being offered to registered users of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 and 9. This custom vocabulary will be specifically tuned to your linguistic patterns, and should provide you with a significant accuracy boost when you dictate to Dragon NaturallySpeaking. In most cases, the custom vocabulary we can create in our laboratories far surpasses what can be done with the traditional accuracy enhancing tools available in the boxed copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking you own. There is no cost to participate in this trial version, nor are there specific guarantees regarding performance improvements. However, most users who have participated in this trial so far have reported substantial improvements in accuracy & speed.

 

How does it work?

1. In the Advanced Dialog box, select “Collect data for research purposes”.
   This will signal DNS to begin collecting data as you use the product. After about 10 hours of dictation a message should pop up which directs you to this web site and instructs you to download and the data collector. Do not run the data collector before being prompted to do so or the data collected may be incomplete. The collected information has been stored on your computer. It cannot be sent to Nuance without your consent. The DNS application cannot send this data to Nuance. The data can only be collected from your machine if you run the separate datacollector.exe program which you will download from the Nuance web site.
2. Nuance will analyze your uploaded data and create a custom vocabulary.  Once they are done, they will email you a link to download your new custom vocabulary over the internet.
3. Then you run the new custom vocabulary and in some cases you will see higher accuracy results!

Requirements For Participation

1. You must be running a version of 8 or 9 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
2. You must have a high-speed connection to the Internet. As part of the process, you will transfer a very large amount of data to us, perhaps 1GB or more. Even with a fast connection, this may take hours to complete. Sending the data to us on a CD/DVD is also an option.
3. You must have at least 500MB disk space free for NaturallySpeaking to collect the data it needs before sending it for analysis and processing.
4. You must agree to the Nuance data gathering agreement-PDF.

How to Set up your system to start collecting the data?

If you have Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, you are already ready to do this if you change a few options settings.  If you are using DNS 8, you will need to download a new patch.

Here’s how you change the options.

Go to your menu and choose Tools>Options

Select the Data Tab and Choose Advanced

Check the Box to start the Data Collection service (and then run Dragon Naturally Speaking for about 10 hours or better)

Dragon Naturally Speaking is a great program and I highly recommend it.  It makes writing, especially emails and long documents very easy.  The program is exceptionally good at tricky word combinations, but does slip up on easy words sometimes.  (like “in” instead of “an” or “and”)

I’m hoping the custom vocabulary might help in this area and other word substitution slip ups.

I do achieve 99% accuracy a majority of the time, but I’m hoping this increases the amount of time, I’m working with DNS9 at 99% accuracy.

Life is full of risks, you can get in a car accident or trip in the shower.  Fortunately, Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 is not very risky.  It works great and is relatively inexpensive compared to the benefit you get from it.  You can mitigate all types of risks with insurance whether you are using car insurance or pet insurance or even life insurance for kids.  I see this custom vocabulary kind of like an insurance that will hopefully help me avoid the risk of word substitutions, especially when my computer is slowing down at the end of a long session.

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