Here is another great hack which you can use to modify the behavior of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
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| A number of people have wished for different enrollment text, either because they are tired of reading the existing enrollment text, or because they want to have their children to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking and find the existing text to difficult for children to read. |
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| In this topic, I will explain how you can add your own enrollment text to Dragon NaturallySpeaking (any version). |
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| I want to point out that there is really nothing special about Dragon's enrollment text. The text was not selected to have a specific coverage of sound. Instead, Dragon selected text mainly based on interest. Text which is used for enrollment is required to have the following properties: |
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| (1) It cannot have any new words. |
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| (2) It must be long enough to get 18 minutes of speech. |
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| The new word problems is actually the trickiest problem and is the main reason that Dragon does not have more enrollment text. Any enrollment text which you use in Dragon NaturallySpeaking must include words which are in the vocabulary or the backup dictionary. If the words are not in either place, then in all likelihood, the user will not be able to get them to recognize during enrollment. |
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| My recommendation for making sure that you do not have any new words, is to put your enrollment text in the Dragon NaturallySpeaking editor window, and click Tools, then Find New Words. You can ignore words which are capitalized forms of words which are you exist in the vocabulary. But you should not ignore words which are completely unknown. |
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| I also recommend that after you add your enrollment text, you enroll yourself and speak every word. If you have trouble getting a single word to recognize, then that word may not be in the vocabulary, and you may need to change your enrollment text. |
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| Dragon NaturallySpeaking requires that you speak for 18 minutes in order to enroll. We have found that this requires between 2,000 and 3,000 words of enrollment text. If you do not have enough enrollment text, the Dragon NaturallySpeaking will start a different story when you get to the end of the enrollment text. |
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| To avoid having this happened you, I recommend that you pick enrollment text which consists of at least 3,000 words. And test it yourself, to make sure that you get 18 minutes of speech before you run out of text. |
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| (Notice that this procedure involves that you enroll on your new text to make sure that it works. Because of this, it is not that useful for people to simply change the enrollment text themselves if they are only going to enroll once. This procedure is really optimized for people who enroll lots of times, or want to set up enrollment text for others.) |
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| The text you use for enrollment should be free from spelling mistakes. It needs to be in standard text format (like you would save out of Dragon NaturallySpeaking itself, or WordPad). The text cannot be in Microsoft Word format, rich text format, WordPerfect format, or any other format other than text in order to work. |
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| The text should be formatted so the each paragraph represents a single line in the file. You can use blank lines to make the file more readable, they will be ignored. If you view your file in WordPad and have word wrap turned on then you will be able to see all of the text. But make sure you look at your text with word wrapped turn off, to make sure that the paragraph breaks are correct. |
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| Try to keep your paragraphs relatively short.no single paragraph should be over 400 characters or it may not fit on a single enrollment screen. You'll have to check every paragraph of your enrollment text in the enrollment program itself to make sure that none of them are too large. |
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| There should be no special characters in your text (like copyright marks or accented characters), although standard punctuation is fine. |
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| To add your text to the enrollment program, put your text file in the c:\NatSpeak\training directory. In that directory you will find other files all of which of the extension of ".bin". These are actually text files. Your file does not need an extension of ".bin", but you can rename it with any extension if you like. (However, do not use a filename with spaces for your text file.) |
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| Then open the file c:\NatSpeak\training\enroll0.bin in WordPad. By default, this file should look like this: |
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Dave Barry in Cyberspace (fun) |
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data2.bin |
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3001: The Final Odyssey (science fiction) |
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data0.bin |
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Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook (fun) |
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data9.bin |
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| Add two lines to the end of this file for your new enrollment text. The first line should be the title which you would like displayed with enrollment lists all of the available text. The second line should be the filename you used for your text. |
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Dave Barry in Cyberspace (fun) |
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data2.bin |
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3001: The Final Odyssey (science fiction) |
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data0.bin |
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Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook (fun) |
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data9.bin |
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My New Enrollment Text (added) |
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myfile.txt |
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| After you have added these two lines, save the file in text format and close WordPad. |
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| Now the next time that you start enrollment with an untrained user, your new enrollment text will be listed for the user to select. |
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| If you would like to make your enrollment text available to users who have already been trained, then you have to add the same two lines to the file c:\NatSpeak\training\enroll1.bin using WordPad and the same procedure described above. This file contains a list of all of the text which can be used for subsequent training. |
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| After you install your enrollment text, you want to make sure that you tested. Enroll with your new text and make sure that you never get stuck on any words which would indicate that some of the words are not in the vocabulary. Also make sure that every paragraph fits entirely on the screen because there are no scroll bars in the enrollment program. You also wanted double check the formatting to make sure that you paragraph breaks are we you expected. |
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