Choose Options for Dragon NaturallySpeaking

Now that you’re in charge, you can order NaturallySpeaking to work your way. It’s time to choose some options! From the DragonBar, choose Tools→Options to open the Options dialog box. There are seven different category options. Take time to check them out and configure your assistant exactly the way you want it to behave.

Five options you may want to try right off the bat are as follows:

• Trade-off speed for accuracy: Miscellaneous tab

• Automatically back up User Profile every 5 times: Data tab

• Change microphone on/off, correction hotkeys: Hotkeys tab

• Double-click to correct in NaturallySpeaking window: Miscellaneous tab

• Playback on correction: Miscellaneous tab

Each tab has a Restore Defaults button. Hurray! Click it if you feel you changed something in error and want to put things back the way they were when you first launched NaturallySpeaking.

Following is a brief explanation about what’s in each tab:

• Correction tab: This tab is useful to explore if you want to have things like Spell commands bring up a spelling window. Take your time and go back to these options after you have worked in your documents for a while. As you might guess, corrections are a fact of life. At least they can be dealt with your way.

• Commands: In this section you have a slider you can configure for the amount of time you want a pause before you dictate a command. It’s set on the shorter end. Try this first before you extend it to see what’s comfortable. Remember that you’ll be dictating both speech and commands, and you want Dragon to understand how you like to do this.

• View: In this tab, you can set your placement of the DragonBar in addition to the way shown. You can also set the DragonBar to display the Extras menu. Additionally, you can set the Results box that was displayed in previous versions of NaturallySpeaking.

  

• Playback/Text-to-speech: Text-to-speech is a fun and functional feature of NaturallySpeaking. It uses a computer-synthesized voice to read text aloud. This will be the voice of your assistant, so choose accordingly (several male and female voice choices). It can sound a bit comical until you get used to it. Adjust the up- and down-arrow keys for volume and speed.

• Miscellaneous tab: This tab includes lots of useful stuff. Most important is the Speed versus Accuracy slider. Move this to the right for fewer recognition errors, or to the left for a quicker, if less accurate, job. The choice is yours.

• Data tab: Here you can change the amount of disk space reserved for playback. The default is 100 MB. It's best not to use less than that, but if you need the space you can set it to use less. If you need more space for playback, you can set it to use more.

  You can also make a choice about whether to “Save recorded dictation with document.” If you want to choose each time you dictate, select Ask Me. If you are using Dragon Professional, choose Never so your files don’t become large and unwieldy.

• Hotkeys tab: You’re either a devoted hotkey user or you aren't. There’s no middle ground. If you like hotkeys, here’s where you change them. Why change? You may have trouble pressing the key. Or you may need to use the key for something else (like using the numeric keypad + and – [minus] keys for calculations).