This is a link to a recent thread in the tips and tricks forum. I added the thread to this forum to offer my answers while respecting Bert's rules.
http://www.amazingcharts.com/ub/ubbthreads.php/forums/5/1/Tips_and_Tricks Dermdoc Response:We recommend listening to Tom Young. It's not that you can't get by with WSR (Vista/Windows 7 speech engine) but rather would you purchase your stethoscope at Kmart to save a few dollars or put bicycle tires on the racecar? That's exactly what you're doing when you use WSR. Some of the best things in life are free but speech recognition isn't one of them. All our company does is specialize in speech recognition and although you can get by with WSR, you're going to spend 4 times longer correcting and that's just the tip of the iceberg. WSR simply doesn't have professional tools to work with the vocabulary and even simple correcting takes too many steps. You have to ask yourself what is your time worth. Granted, Dragon Medical and Small Practice Edition may sound like a huge chunk of change but I urge you to think of what it can potentially $ave you down the road in time and money.
Speaking of vocabularies... NaturallySpeaking doesn't include medical vocabularies. It includes 48 medical language models which goes far beyond a simple collection of words. Language models include commonly used phrases strung together to increase accuracy and make ample use of the Written Form/Spoken Form. Of course you could build your own language model but it would probably take several months.
Melanie Response:A quick note about purchasing NaturallySpeaking software from eBay: It's gray or black marketing and Nuance will not support you or permit you to upgrade. Legitimate licensed resellers are not permitted to sell NaturallySpeaking on eBay and there is no such thing as an eBay reseller making a special deal with Nuance. It has never happened and it never will. Unless your NaturallySpeaking DVD includes 3 copies of the serial number (2 of which are peel off labels) and serial number information in 8 different languages and an official DNS manual (help files on disk don't count), it's a fake and you can probably even see the burn ring on the back of the DVD. Please don't support software piracy by purchasing from eBay. When you purchase from a legitimate Nuance-certified reseller you receive legitimate software and real support from both the vendor and Nuance.
As far as comparing Ver. 9 to Ver. 10 is concerned, I recommend forgetting about the manufacturer claims of a 20% boost in accuracy because even if it's true, I would only see a .2% accuracy gain because my Ver. 9 accuracy was 99%. However, what the manufacturer should have said was that Ver. 10 is minimally 20% more efficient meaning that if you dictate 5 hours a day with Ver. 9 you can cut that down to about 4 hours a day or dictate about 12 hours a day with WSR. Ver. 10 includes about 30 time-saving improvements but I will just mention 2 here:
1. Having to wait 3 to 5 seconds for the words to drop from Results Box and land in your document is gone. As soon as you stop speaking, your words appear in your document.
2. Non-capitalization after punctuation is common in Ver. 9 and every time you correct the word in front of a punctuation mark, you have to remove the extra space.
When you add up the extra time it takes to wait for your dictation to hit the page, capitalizing words that should have been automatically capitalized and removing unwanted spacing, you just increased your dictation time by about 20% which is what you're doing with Ver. 9. If you'd like to see what else you're missing, check out the NaturallySpeaking 10 Review ~
http://www.knowbrainer.com/downloads/DNS_10_Review.pdf for 15 months ago. KnowBrainer Inc. is currently #1 in DNS Pro, Medical and Small Practice sales but what's different about our company is that we actually use the technology that we sell. We simply don't have any choice if we want to get out of work before midnight.
Scalpel Response:Click here to download the new KnowBrainer PowerMike Manual ~
http://www.knowbrainer.com/downloads/PowerMic_II_Instructions.PDF that our customers automatically receive along with our thickly padded neoprene zippered headset bag.
Ryanjo Response:If you're using DNS Pro or Dragon Medical (not Small Practice Edition) you don't have to deal with @@@ because NaturallySpeaking has a built-in hardcoded command called “Next Field”. Try constructing a template and placing [ ] around any text that you want NaturallySpeaking to highlight. For example: You can place brackets around [Patient Name]. If the cursor is before the patient name say “Next Field” or “Previous Field” to go back to the patient name. Having to spend extra time double-clicking on a field is still a little time consuming when it isn't necessary. Let the built-in command do the heavy lifting for you instead of looking for the next @@@. Note that this capability is not available in the Small Practice Edition.
JBS Response:It sounds like you are simply not working with the right speech recognition solutions provider. You certainly need a better soundcard/microphone then what comes in the box but there's much more to obtaining high accuracy. We never recommend more than a single short 7 minute training and even that is an option in Ver. 10. NaturallySpeaking includes some incredible tools ranging from the Command Browser, to the Vocabulary Editor, Vocabulary Builder and Language & Model Optimizers but if you don't know how to use these utilities or more importantly, your provider isn't even mentioning them, you're only going to get minimal results out of NaturallySpeaking. When it comes to speech recognition, your reseller should also be your speech recognition consultant. One of the reasons why we built the world's largest speech recognition support forum, the KnowBrainer Speech Recognition Forums ~
http://www.knowbrainer.com/PubForum/ was to drive this point home by offering 24-hour support from some of the greatest speech recognition experts on the planet like Chuck Runquist (former head NaturallySpeaking developer) who has contributed over 5000 answers alone. In some ways NaturallySpeaking trains you but NaturallySpeaking is actually designed to learn from you and not the other way around.
Melanie Response:You should almost never have to train a command. Our team has written over 11,000 commands and none of them require training. If you're having to train commands then you are either suffering from severe substandard accuracy (which may be attributed to a number of reasons) or you are using an odd naming convention, which we doubt. Although NaturallySpeaking has a vast vocabulary, whenever you say a word or phrase, it checks the command list 1st so it should be almost impossible for commands to fail to deploy.
Ryanjo Response:Try dictating “one hundred and thirty” instead of “one thirty” which may produce the time. However, you should be able to dictate “one thirty to one sixty” in DNS Medical to produce “130 - 160” but you may have to make an adjustment to your DNS Formatting Options.
A good way to handle dictating Cangiano is to add Cangiano to the Written Form of the Vocabulary Editor and “can't join” to the Spoken Form but the simplest approach is to add the phrase “Dr. Cangiano”. In KnowBrainer 2008 ~
https://www.knowbrainer.com/storefront/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.display&category_id=3 (third-party NaturallySpeaking command utility that is free to our Dragon Medical customers) we can highlight a phrase like “Dr. Cangiano”, say “Add to Vocabulary” and the problem is permanently history. Whenever possible, try combining a problematic word with another word or 2, by turning it into a phrase and then adding that phrase to your vocabulary. This is one of NaturallySpeaking's greatest strengths.
Melanie Response:We have temporarily removed the Buddy StylusMic from our website and recommend against purchasing it unless you absolutely have to have one right now because it's in the process of being revamped. Some of the new amenities include real programmable buttons (the current programmable buttons simply don't work), higher accuracy, better noise cancellation and wireless. The microphone is already out of the lab but not yet in production. In our opinion, the current Buddy StylusMic just isn't quite up to expectations.
