Miscellaneous Tips

Dictation Mode vs Command Mode

Dragon Dictate has two different modes that you can use. “Dictation Mode” means that dragon will try to type whatever you say onto the screen, and if your phrase starts with a keyword that dragon recognizes as a “command”, dragon will try to execute the command. “Command Mode” means that Dragon will only execute commands and not dictation. When using VoiceCode, I recommend keeping Dragon in command mode, because it decreases command-recognition latency by as much as 40%. However, if you are going to be dictating a lot of regular text you may want to use Dragon Dictate directly in dictation mode. I personally only use command mode because I have gotten very good at using the VoiceCode commands for regular prose like writing an email (or this guide).

Two vs. To, For vs. Four

The English words “two” and “to”, and “four”, and “for” are very ambiguous.

A Command with a grammar type of “numberCapture” will interpret the words “to” and “for” as the numbers “2” and “4”. however, a textCapture command will interpret the words “to” and “for” as the words “to” and “for”. If you want a textCapture command to receive the numbers “2” or “4”, use the words “twah” and “quads” instead.

For example:

spoken: “snake my variable to”
result: “my_variable_to”

spoken: “snake my variable twah”
result: “my_variable_2”

spoken: “snake my variable for”
result: “my_variable_for”

spoken: “snake my variable quads”
result: “my_variable_4”

Conflicting Vocab Words

Sometimes Dragon will spell one of the keywords wrong, which will make VoiceCode operate incorrectly. For example the keyword “Ricky”, Dragon may occasionally spell as “Rickie”. When you encounter these scenarios, there are two options:

• Just open Dragon’s vocabulary editor and delete the conflicting word from the vocabulary.
• Add an “alias” to the command so that it will be triggered by multiple spellings of the command name. For example, in your settings file just add something like:

Commands.addMisspellings "ricky", ["rickie", "rikeeeeee"]

Dragon Dictate commands vs. VoiceCode commands

Dragon Dictate supports static commands, but it cannot chain or nest commands to achieve the complex results needed for programmers to gain efficiency. Dragon Dictate needs to know when spoken text should be handled normally and when it should be passed over to the VoiceCode server. Therefore, for every keyword that VoiceCode needs to recognize, a base-command needs to be added to Dragon Dictate. These base-commands essentially capture whatever text follows them and send the whole phrase over to the VoiceCode server for processing.

Fortunately, VoiceCode automatically takes care of synchronizing Dragon Dictate's commands with any changes made to VoiceCode. Check out the section on synchronizing Dragon