I am hoping to hear others' thoughts on how to best go about self-educating ourselves for using Dragon effectively.

In my case, I was very happy with DNS 8.1, which I have used for 7 years, but it is now time to change.  My philosophy is similar to what Jim Collins described in Good to Great.  According to his study, the most productive companies don't fret about having the latest or the greatest.  What they focus on instead is maximizing the utility of what they have, whatever it may be.  As I go about deciding how much of my always-limited discretionary time to spend in maximizing my Dragon system, I don't believe that I am well served by keeping up with industry developments, but I do try to focus on what will help me be productive with what I have.

With that being said, I am interested to know what other rank-and-file users do to teach themselves what they need to know?  Specifically, are there other websites that are complementary and respected, or are they all essentially plowing the same ground?  Is the Nuance knowledge base worth exploring?

Wayne

Wayne,

Whenever I'm using Dragon and want to do something by voice, my first (and often best!) strategy is just to guess. Honestly, I think "what would I want to say to make my computer do this?" and then say it. Guessing gets me the right answer a stupidly high percentage of the time, and never fails to make me smile. If my guessing game doesn't work, I'll search the Command Browser for keywords I think might be part of the command I'm looking for. If I can't find a reasonable keyword, I'll either check the Dragon help ("search Dragon help for..." the task that I'm trying to accomplish, or go about creating a voice command myself.

The best advice is "use it or lose it." Practice, practice, practice. Having used DNS 8.1 for 7 years, you're probably doing that. So remember to have fun while you're using Dragon. Experiment, try crazy voice commands, think about what tasks you'd like to accomplish by voice and how you'd use the keyboard to do those tasks. If you can do it with a keyboard, whipping up a voice command with something like KnowBrainer or VoicePower or Vocola or AutoHotKey or even calling a macro in something like Microsoft Word is often a cinch.

For self-teaching, I think you've got the right approach. Find a group of end users and bounce ideas off of them. My favorite group is right here, but there are other good forums out there (some run by members here). I read the Speech Computing forums and the Speech Empowered Computing forums casually. If you're looking for a good book on Dragon and you're serious about learning to write voice commands to automate your workflow, "Scripting for Dragon NaturallySpeaking" (available at the KnowBrainer shop and wherever else speech recognition goods are reputably sold) by Larry Allen (who's also got his own shop and consultancy business) is the Bible on the subject.

Cheers,

Eric Wright At work: DNS 12 Pro. At home: DNS 11.5 Pro,  KnowBrainer 2011, and Utter Command by RedStart Systems; Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac

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