Preventing Noises from Being Entered as Words in Dual Writer

This video tutorial discusses how to prevent unintended noises and background sounds from being entered into your Dual Writer documents as words during dictation. Dual Writer can block commonly misunderstood words that are confused with sounds, and improve the accuracy of dictation.

Also demonstrated is how to add additional vocabulary words to the Windows Speech Recognition Dictionary.

Transcript of the video

In this tutorial we’ll talk about preventing unintended sounds from being entered as text into your documents while you’re using Dual Writer. I’ll click on the Dictation Tab to get started.

Before continuing, I want to be clear this is not about adding words to the system dictionaries. Dual Writer uses the Windows Speech Recognition system, so you don’t need any additional software. All the words that are in the system are used by Dual Writer, and to add additional words to Dual Writer you just add them to the system by using the Shared Recognizer.

Right click on the microphone. It shows Open the Speech Dictionary, and from here you can add a new word. Any time you have new vocabulary that you want Dual Writer to understand just come here and click Add a New Word. You can type in the word and you can say the pronunciation. Also from the speech dictionaries you can choose Prevent a Word From Being Dictated. If there is a word you never, ever want in your documents, just come here and add that.

This tutorial is about preventing random noises from being entered into your document, so I’m going to click the Dictation Button and start dictating and making some sounds. Let’s see what comes up. Also, I’m going to lower the Confidence Level here to about 25 so that this increases the possibility that random noises will be entered into the document by sniffing or clearing my throat.

Dictation is now on.
And As an and paste and and and and from
stop listening

OK, that’s enough of making grunting noises. See what happened as a series of words were entered into the document that you didn’t really want to be entered.

One thing you can do to increase the accuracy is bring the Confidence Level back up to probably around 50. You can experiment with this for best results. But also you can add these words to the Blocked List in Dual Writer, and in that way they will never be entered by themselves into your document.

Let’s see how that works. Click the top left tab and then click on Options. This brings up the Speech Options. Click on Edit Blocked Words, and the Blocked Words List appears. You can add words here that are randomly getting entered into your document when you clear your throat or breath into the microphone.

The words that come up for you and come up for me on this system are probably different. It depends on the acoustics of the room, ambient noise and the microphone that you’re using. The common ones are the words “but,” “and,” “that,” “ffe,” “an,” and “if.”

So now these words have been added to the blocked list, we’ll click OK. Now when you speak with Dual Writer, these words will not appear in your document when they are spoken by themselves. Let’s try it.

start listening
New-paragraph
(“But” did not get entered)
stop listening

You can see that the frame around the dictation window turned blue and it said that “but” is a blocked word, so you can’t enter it into the document by itself, but you can say “OK” and the word “but” will be entered. If you don’t want to enter that word, then all you need to do is just keep on dictating and ignore the message.

So every time that you have a random word that is added to your document that was the result of a sniff or a noise across the room, just block it. Over time you’ll have a list of maybe 10 or 12 words, and with those words blocked your dictation experience will be much better.

 

 

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