At A Word

Speech Recognition Tools and Tips

Avoiding Vocal Strain
Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows
Susan Fulton's Out Loud page has a lot of general tips for improving accuracy and avoiding straining your voice while dictating, as well as information on specific speech recognition products.
There are a number of mailing lists which are valuable sources of information and help.

My apologies for the many broken links below. I've copied links I've verified to VoiceCode Links

The Voice Coder FAQ and the resource list at VoiceCode are good places to start.
The members of the Voice Coder mailing list at Yahoo! Groups are happy to share their tips on programming by voice.
The VoiceCode project is an open-source project to develop an integrated set of tools for programming by voice with continuous speech recognition products.
While VoiceCode is under development, many of the existing tools have been collected together as the Programming by Voice (PBV) Kit.
Jonathan Epstein has demonstration of Java by voice
my lecture notes on programming by voice are available. They are written in terms of DragonDictate, and the details are out-of-date, but some of the concepts are still relevant.
Brad Litterell's The Dragon's Lair has many programming macros as well as a utility for converting DragonDictate macro (DDX) files to NaturallySpeaking Professional 2/3/4/5 (DVC) format.
I wrote a brief description of how Select-and-Say works in NaturallySpeaking, and how you can add it to your own programs with the NaturallySpeaking SDK

Dictating HTML:
for dictating HTML, I tend to use vocabulary words with different written and spoken forms, when possible, rather than macros. That way, I can say "insert list item dictating HTML new line insert list item..." to generate
```
<LI>dictating HTML
<LI>
```
without having to pause after each tag.
I add the vocabulary words en masse using the "add predefined list of words" option in the Vocabulary Builder (NaturallySpeaking 5 and earlier) or the "add a list of words to your vocabulary" option in the accuracy center in NaturallySpeaking 6. Simply create the list of words in a text editor, one per line, in the format "written\spoken". You can also add individual words with the Vocabulary Editor in NaturallySpeaking.
You can download my own list of HTML words. It is not comprehensive, since my web pages are generally quite simple, but it may be useful as an example or a starting point for developing your own list. Note that Internet Explorer incorrectly treats this file as if it were HTML instead of plain text, so you'll need to right click and use Save As to download it properly.
I also have a macro for the headings tags, in the old (pre-NaturallySpeaking 6) DVC format.
If you write technical papers with the LaTeX mathematical typesetting system, you may want to try out my NatLatex system for dictating LaTeX with NaturallySpeaking.

The most popular speech recognition mailing lists are hosted by Yahoo! Groups. You can sign up to have individual messages, or daily digests e-mailed to you, or you can read them on the Web. You can also search the archives of old messages. Most of the lists are not specific to particular speech software, although messages about NaturallySpeaking tend to dominate simply because it is the most widely used program.
- Voice Group is a general purpose list.
- Voice Computing (VoiceComp) is another general list, aiming to be less technical.
- Voice Coder deals with tips on programming by voice, as well as dictation of other document formats besides ordinary text and word processing (HTML, LaTeX, etc).
- Nat Pro (natpro-wp8) is a group about writing macros for NaturallySpeaking Professional.
voice-users (a.k.a. Voice Recognition Users Group or VRUG) is an older general purpose list. Unfortunately, it's archives are incomplete and often out of date, and not searchable.

This document last modified on 1/3/2002

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