I have a decade of habits using dragon naturallyspeaking, some which I want to keep. One I have found particularly hard to break is saying " left paren" and "right paren" instead of "open and close". I cannot figure out how to train windows speech recognition to put a parentheses when I say "left parentheses".

Are there any resources that speak to this? Thanks!

Responding to my own post. I found an initial answer in this tutorial/article which explain how to do it. Use the " emulate" options in the "windows speech recognition macros" program.

 http://www.vista4beginners.com/Enhance-Windows-Speech-Recognition-Using-Macros

 It works wonderfully well as long as I'm only offering the macro. However, if I use the macro as part of an ongoing sentence (such as saying the "left parentheses" instead of "open parentheses", it does not work.

Is there a way to add it to my custom dictionaries, rather than using a macro?

Just say "start speech dictionary." It should be pretty obvious after that.

-Russ

Thank you. I also found the "open speech dictionary" option when I right click the windows speech recognition bar. That is exactly what I was looking for.

 Unfortunately, it doesn't seem To work with the "left paren" and "right paren". I don't know why. It seems to work with many other words. Maybe it just doesn't work when creating a symbol rather than a word? I really don't know.

Teloscientist

You can shorten the commands as follows: when using WSR, all you need to Say is either 'open paren' or 'close paren'.

When using Dragon all you need to say is either 'open bracket' or 'close bracket'.

Tiger Feet

| DNS 12 Professional | KnowBrainer 2012 | Windows 7 Professional /64 Bit | Intel Core i7 Quad Core 3840QM (2.80GHz) 8MB | 16GB RAM. | 240GB Intel 520 Series SSD Boot Drive | 750GB 7200 rpm Secondary Drive  | Plantronics Wireless Handsfree Microphone CS60-USB. |