Dragon Professional Individual For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

Dragon Professional Individual understands only those who have officially introduced themselves as users and created a User Profile. Here are four reasons why you may want to make more than one User Profile for yourself:

  • You use different vocabularies or writing styles for different tasks.

  • You use different microphones for different tasks.

  • You want to use different Dragon Professional Individual options for different tasks. For instance, you may want to turn off certain features to save memory when using Dragon Professional Individual with big applications. Option choices are part of the definition of a user.

  • You have a laptop or other hardware and use it in two or more distinct environments (noisy/quiet, outdoors/indoors, in bed/in the pool, and so on).

The drawback of having more than one user per person is the extra vocabulary training of Dragon Professional Individual that the person must do. Each user maintains his own training and experience, starting with the initial microphone check (Audio→Check Microphone) that you must repeat for each user.

The same holds true for ongoing training. If you use the phrase "boogie-woogie" in both your personal and professional lives, for instance, not only do you have a very interesting life, but also you have to train both users so that Dragon Professional Individual recognizes the phrase.

You can change or broaden Dragon Professional Individual's definition of a user, however. You don't have to have a separate user for, say, when you have a head cold. Instead, you can choose Read Text to Improve Accuracy from the Audio menu and Dragon Professional Individual will add its "head cold" experience to its previous experience of your voice. It will do better the next time you are sneezy (or grumpy or both).

Likewise, if you run the microphone check, Dragon Professional Individual changes the microphone volume to adapt to any change in microphone position. You can train a single user to broadly cover all the types of writing you do, too. The problem with broadening a user definition is that overall accuracy will go down to the same degree that you have distinctly different situations.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Stephanie Diamond is a thought leader, management marketing professional, and founder of Digital Media Works, Inc., an online marketing company that helps business owners discover the hidden profits in their businesses. She has worked with small business owners and multibillion-dollar corporations.

This article can be found in the category: