Editing in Other Apps

Last Modified: January 22, 2000

First introduced in Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Teens, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 3.52 (all editions) is support for both dictating and correcting in more applications.

In version 1.0 of NatSpeak, you could only dictate into the Dragon NaturallySpeaking native editor window. With version 2.0, Dragon Systems introduced NaturalWord which allows you to dictate and correct in Microsoft Word and later Corel WordPerfect (see NaturalWord). Dragon also introduced NaturalText which allows you to dictate into almost any application but without voice correction (see NaturalText).

Without voice correction, all you can do is send keystrokes to other applications. For example, you can switch to Lotus Notes and dictate and the text will appear in Lotus Notes. But if the system makes a mistake, you have to correct it using the mouse and keyboard. (Although the command "Correct That" does allow you to correct the last thing you said if you have not touched the mouse or keyboard in the meantime.) In addition, when you start dictating again, Dragon NaturallySpeaking may forget the capitalization state because it can not read the text from your application (Lotus Notes in this example).

With NatSpeak's native editor window or when using Microsoft Word you can not only dictate but you can also correct by voice using such commands as "Select " and "Correct ". This is Dragon's so called Select 'n' Say technology.

Now with the Teens product and version 3.5 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you can dictate and correct in some additional applications. Specifically, support has been enabled for the following applications:

• Notepad (all versions)
• Wordpad (all versions)
• GoldMine
• Microsoft Chat versions 2.1 and 2.5
• Microsoft Outlook

  Note: Select 'n' Say is supported in Outlook only when you use plain text or rich text. If you set the options to create HTML e-mail or use Microsoft Word as your e-mail editor then Select 'n' Say will not work in Outlook.

• NaturallySpeaking's own dialogs

  This means that you can dictate and use Select 'n' Say in every edit control in every dialog box in Dragon NaturallySpeaking except for the Correction Dialog.

With this new feature, which is always turned on, dictation into any of these applications is almost the same as dictation into Drgaon NaturallySpeaking's native editor or Microsoft Word.

Technical Details

In order for Select 'n' Say to work, Dragon NaturallySpeaking has to be able to access the text currently being displayed by your application and the location of the selection or caret. NatSpeak also has to be able to change the selection and the selected text.

To make this work for Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect, Dragon had to write application specific add-on modules which access the necessary information through published interfaces to these programs. Because application-specific code was needed, Select 'n' Say support was limited to those applications which (1) had rich enough programming interfaces to access the information and (2) for which there was a reasonable commercial interest in doing the engineering.

As it happens, many Windows programs are written using using built in text editing features called "edit controls" and "rich edit controls". And it is possible to access the necessary information for those controls using published Windows interfaces.

Select 'n' Say support was added to the previous list of applications simply by adding code specific to Windows edit and rich edit controls. Every one of those applications uses standard Windows edit or rich edit controls to display their text so the same support code works for each of those applications.

Experienced Windows programmers may have realized that there are a lot more Windows applications which use edit and rich edit controls than those listed above. This is true but to ensure reliable support for dictation directly into applications, every target application has to be tested by Dragon's Quality Assurance department before support is enabled. Only the applications listed above have been tested and enabled for dictation.

Of course, if you are willing to gamble a little, you can manually enable Select 'n' Say support in other applications. See Enabling Voice Editing for more details.

This web page (http://www.synapseadaptive.com/joel/EditingInOtherApps.html) was last modified on January 22, 2000. The contents of this page are (c) Copyright 1998-1999 by Joel Gould. All Rights Reserved. See Copyright Information for more details.