I'm in the process of trying to switch from 9.5 to 11.5, but I'm finding it hard going.  One thing I am particularly having trouble with is a change to the way letters work.  In 9.5, I could just use letters right in the middle of normal dictation; this is a handy way to deal with words that you need once and aren't worth putting in the vocabulary, or similar situations.  So, for example, if I need to dictate a sentence like this:

 Has Aisha signed the energy audit yet?

In 9.5 I can do this thusly:

 Has Cap Alpha India Sierra Hotel Alpha signed the energy audit yet?

Which makes it much more efficient, because I don't have to stop, switch into spelling mode, then stop again and switch out of spelling mode.

And, if I use only letters this way in clumps, e.g. if I say:

 Alpha India Sierra Hotel Alpha space-bar November Golf

... and therefore get this:

 aisha ng

I can then say "cap that" and get:

 Aisha Ng

I.e., only the first letter is capitalized in any given clump of letters dictated this way.  It understands that a clump is a word.

11.5 has ruined this.  Dictating exactly the same thing as above:

 Has Cap Alpha India Sierra Hotel Alpha signed the energy audit yet?

... results in this:

 Has AISHA signed the energy audit yet?

Someone has apparently decided that letters dictated in line should all be capitalized!  Not only that, but *each letter is now treated as a separate word*, so if I select the resultant mess and say "no caps that" followed by "cap that", ALL the letters are again capitalized.  It no longer understands that the clump is meant to be one word.

Does anyone have any idea how to get around this and make it go back to the 9.5-style behavior?

Thanks,
Lisa.

-------------------------
Main computer Core i3, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit, using 9.5 Professional but trying to migrate to 11.5 Professional

We covered a good deal of your question in the immediate previous thread which you'll find here. However, when you say cap that, NaturallySpeaking only places your last or highlighted dictation in Title Case; not UPPERCASE. Try substituting all caps that for cap that unless you are using KnowBrainer 2011 and then you can actually say what you are thinking; Title Case and UPPERCASE.

-------------------------

Click KB 2012 REV D to Download a 30 Day Evaluation of KnowBrainer 2012
Click SpeechStart+ to Download a 15 Day Evaluation of SpeechStart+

I've run into this issue as well. The problem is that you are spelling a proper noun like someone's name and get the all-CAPS. Then you say "NO-CAPS that" which takes it to "chad". Now you say "CAP-that" because you want to capitalize the first C and the result is "CHAD". It changes it to the all-CAPS instead of "Chad".

So far it doesn't seem that there's any answer other than to retrain myself to pause before spelling anything. Unfortunately it looks like I'll be stuck using 10.1 primarily until they fix this issue. Talk about frustrating.

Perhaps I'll play around with the vocabulary editor tonight to see if I can figure out a workaround.

Thanks,
Chad

NatSqueakUser

Basically you have summed the situation pretty well, bottom line is that they completely changed spell mode and "in-line dictation spell mode" with version 11 and, messed it up.

Among other things they decided to allow you to mix the phonetic alphabet with the normal alphabet in spell mode and they also decided that all in-line dictation single characters should be capitalised.  I can't remember exactly which version corresponds to what but from memory a half implemented this new setup with version 10 and then they resorted to the old system with version 10.1.

Personally I introduced custom commands that allow you to spell only in the phonetic alphabet but as Chad has already pointed out the problem with this is that you need to pause before and after spelling out a word by this method.  Sorry but I don't know of any solution other than waiting for a version 12 and crossing your fingers that they address the issue.

Lindsay

You also used to be able to dictate things like "…spell alpha india…" as part of continuous dictation but you can no longer do that as it just transcribes the word "spell" as part of it.

-------------------------

www.pcbyvoice.com
www.pcbyvoice.co.uk

That's right Lindsay. I thought I recalled having to add some custom words to the vocabulary in version 10. They took out "letter alpha" for each of the letters in the alphabet.

So I spent far too much time tonight going through and adding new words and deleting words from the vocabulary. The problem is that in every other version of NaturallySpeaking the vocabulary was:

written form\spoken form
a\alpha
b\bravo
c\Charlie
d\delta

now it is
A\alpha
B\bravo
C\Charlie
D\delta

So I deleted all of these and wrote the old-style military alphabet lettering (if I was smart I would have exported from 10.1) with lowercase letters. It works okay. Perhaps okay is generous. Alpha and especially Papa are driving me nuts. I'm going to end up deleting half of my vocabulary to get the latter recognized with any sort of frequency. I'm out of time tonight, but I'll mess around with this some more tomorrow I'm sure.

Chad

I have always had problems with alpha and now I basically have to say elpha otherwise I get papa.  I like your approach with the vocabulary so I will have to try that.

Lindsay

-------------------------

www.pcbyvoice.com
www.pcbyvoice.co.uk

Interesting that you both seem to have particular troubles with alpha; I am having exactly the same thing in 11.5.  I thought it was because I, like the earlier poster, had been tinkering with the vocabulary to try to fix the problem and naturally, the first letter I landed on was alpha.

When I did tinker with the vocabulary, I found something else strange, which was that the entries for the spelled letters each have normal properties, i.e. they say they should have spaces before and after them.  And yet, when you say them in sequence, they come out clumps.  How does it know to do that?  And, when I tinkered, the letter alpha stopped clumping, i.e. if I dictated alpha bravo charlie, I began to get a bc instead of abc.  So, without having modified the properties, it began to behave differently anyway!

Thanks,
Lisa.

-------------------------
Main computer Core i3, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit, using 9.5 Professional but trying to migrate to 11.5 Professional

Lisa

The way it knows how to do that is that it doesn't use purely these these vocabulary entries to do it.  The problem is that if it did use vocabulary entries Dragon couldn't set fixed properties of these phonetic characters, such as no space before and no space after, because these properties will depend on whether the phonetic character comes at the beginning of the spelled-out word, in the middle or at the end.  So when you try to edit the vocabulary to get yourself some sort of spell mode similar to what we used to have its riddled with pitfalls and ambiguities like Rüdiger mentions above.

There is a way of doing it with the vocabulary by saying something like the following continuously:

"I would like to talk to spell Cap Alpha india sierra hotel end spell alpha and then give you my opinion"

giving you:

"I would like to talk to Aisha and then give you my opinion"

This is how it used to work except you did not have to say "end spell alpha" for the last character in a spelt out word, however you will soon get used to it.  I don't mean that this will work as it is now but after adding some entries to the vocabulary it will.

Lindsay

-------------------------

www.pcbyvoice.com
www.pcbyvoice.co.uk

Interesting, I have never been able to use the spell command as you describe.  In fact I never use it because I find that it goes extremely stupid; recognition accuracy plummets.  If I were to say something like what you described I can pretty much guarantee that I would get nothing like the right thing.

Or... is it just that you can't use the word "spell" in line until later versions than 9.5?

Thanks,
Lisa.

-------------------------
Main computer Core i3, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit, using 9.5 Professional but trying to migrate to 11.5 Professional

Actually Lisa I must apologise because I have never been able to use the spell command in continuous dictation like I previously said either. Now that I think about it I had to actually pause in normal mode in order to use spell in that way. in order to do it continuously you had to dictate the way you mentioned in your initial post and it worked very well.

However you can add entries to the vocabulary to get it working in continuous mode as I described above with version 11. You could also try what Chad suggests.

Lindsay

-------------------------

www.pcbyvoice.com
www.pcbyvoice.co.uk

Lisa & Lindsay,

First, I concur with Rüdiger's assessment with regard to DNS 11.5.

The in-line direct spell command is a command and just like any other command it requires a pause before executing such. You don't have to take my word for it, this comes directly from the recognition history:

spell cap alpha India sierra hotel alpha                                            x        10:14:33

If you note the "x", that denotes it as a command. However, you won't find it in the Command Browser because it's an embedded command and it depends on (for execution) removing the checkmark from the checkbox in the Dragon Options | Corrections tab | "Spell" commands bring up Spelling Window. Otherwise saying "spell" will just bring up the Spelling Window. By the same token, the same happens (i.e., brings up the Spelling Window, if you pause too long after saying "spell" ).

Which results inAisha

However, note also that the command puts Dragon in an in-line "spell mode" state, which eliminates all spacing. So in order to use it properly, you have to add a space before you execute the direct in-line "spell" command. Use it properly you have to say the following:

Which results in having to say "space bar spell cap alpha India sierra hotel alpha" so that you get

Which results in Aisha

That is, you have to space before you use the direct in-line command "spell". Otherwise you get no spacing.

The caveat with messing around with the vocabulary (Vocabulary Editor) is that if you're not careful you can get yourself a big hole out of which it's almost impossible to climb.

Chuck Runquist
Technical Project Manager
VoiceTeach LLC
Home of VoicePower®: We don't make Dragon NaturallySpeaking, We make it better!

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't. - Pete Seeger

-------------------------

Okay, I'm not sure what happened between last night and today, but so far the spelling vocabulary I changed seems to be working well. I saved my speech files late last night despite being frustrated still with the spelling. I did not reopen the user or restart the computer or anything today. I just started dictating and now all of the spelling is working much better. So far I'm not noticing any degradation of my overall accuracy either. Now in order to get to this point I did have to sacrifice words like India, November, delta, and a few others that kept inserting themselves into my spelling. I just created alternatives like "the country India", "month of November". This might seem like too much hassle to some people, but for me, as long as it works, it's well worth the sacrifice.

If anybody would like to try this here is what I did. I would suggest either backing up your speech files or creating a new user to test this.

1. Open the vocabulary editor and delete the following words for each letter of the alphabet.

Spoken form\written form
A\alpha
A\letter alpha
B\bravo
B\letter bravo

Go all the way through zulu

2. Import the word list attached to this post into your vocabulary.

3. In the vocabulary editor highlight all of these new words (4 for each letter) after selecting the option to show custom words only. Click on properties and change it to put 0 spaces after the word.

4. Click train to train all 104 of these new words/phrases individually.

Give it a shot. You may find, like I did, that you'll need to delete a lot of the actual words used in the military alphabet. I created alternative ways to dictate that word if I wanted it such as "the country India" or "month of November".

Oh yeah, I use "space-bar" after I spell something since these new military alphabet phrases don't have spaces after them. This takes a little getting used to, but again at least for me it's worth the trouble.

It's still not as good as previous versions. However so far I would say it's at least usable.

Good luck,
Chad

Thanks for pointing me to that earlier conversation.  Your conclusion there seems to have been that we will have to wait for version 12 and hope that they change the behavior back.  Do you know whether anyone has actually reported this as a problem?  I mean, obviously they put some thought into changing this behavior, so presumably they think it was a good idea to do this.  (Somebody on their planet clearly thinks that the only reason for using letters in line is to dictate an acronym.)

Thanks,
Lisa.

-------------------------
Main computer Core i3, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 64-bit, using 9.5 Professional but trying to migrate to 11.5 Professional

Exactly! That's at least my interpretation of why they did what they did. It seems that their attempt was to allow for dictating acronyms in a more "natural manner" than previously. In former versions, for instance, dictating single letters came out as initials. Maybe there is also a good reason for changing it, I am not certain, but so it seems. Anyway, new users wouldn't complain about it the way that older users do. And I for one would rather try to go with the changes than settle for transmogrifying the entire vocabulary, or at least some eminent parts of it. Besides, there is more to the underlying spell mechanism than what you can see in the vocabulary, as previously noted by another poster, and this is true not only for letters, but for dictating numbers also, so basically, take care what you do.

Rüdiger

-------------------------

Well, it's past the point where we can make any changes in the code, but we can still make changes to the Easter Egg!