Technological Empowerment for VET trainers. An Open Educational Resource (OER)

to train VET trainers in the design and use of m-learning methodologies.

Dragon Dictation

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Dragon Dictation for the iPhone Basics

The Dragon Dictation app is available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Nuance, the

maker of Dragon, also offers a BlackBerry app called Dragon for E-mail and Flex T9, an

Android app.

The Dragon Dictation app is offered in several languages, including U.S. English, U.K.

English, European Spanish, Latin American Spanish, European and Canadian versions of

French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Once you’ve downloaded the app,

simply tap the Settings icon, which is found in the lower right corner of the first screen, and

choose your preferred language.

As the screenshots show, once the Dragon Dictation app is opened, the first screen that

appears is the Tap and Dictate screen. Press the red button to start recording.

When you’re finished, press Done.

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The app processes the information, after which a screen appears with dictated text. The most

difficult words are proper names. Although Dragon can be able to handle the name Enrique

with no problem, Ryan ca be converted to Brian.

But making corrections is easy – and still much faster than typing an entire message on

your iPhone. In the bottom left corner of the screen is a small keyboard. When you tap on the

keyboard icon, the keyboard comes up, allowing you to make changes or corrections. Once

you’re satisfied, press the keyboard icon again, and the keyboard disappears.

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The toolbar provides a number of options once you’re ready to transmit your message. Simply

press the icon in the lower right corner to bring up the toolbar.

The toolbar is a nifty feature of Dragon Dictation 2.0. If you want to send a text, press the text

icon, and the app will access your contacts. When you begin typing the name of the person

you want to text, Dragon will automatically give you a menu of selections. (The same is true

for email.) The toolbar allows you to post status updates in Twitter and Facebook. And the

copy feature is good for many purposes.

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How to Dictate Punctuation Marks in Dragon Dictation for iPhone

The failsafe way to incorporate punctuation marks into the text is to use voice commands

during dictation.

For example, if you want a sentence that looked like this:

Henry, thanks for contacting me about the deposition. How does next Tuesday at 10 a.m.

work for you?

You would say this:

Henry comma thanks for contacting me about the deposition period. How does next Tuesday

at 10 a.m. work for you question mark

Perhaps the trickiest command is that for quotations marks. To insert a quote, you need to

pause briefly between saying the command “open quote” and beginning the first word of the

sentence. The same is true for closing the quote. The command is “close quote,” followed by a

pause before you start the next sentence.

Here’s a chart of punctuation marks and their verbal commands:

. Period

, Comma

? Question mark

! Exclamation point

- Hyphen

“” open quote [then pause] Close quote [then pause]

For a new paragraph, just say, “New paragraph.”

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How to dictate longer texts and resume dictating an Open Note

If you sometimes need to pause while you dictate to gather your thoughts and formulate your

next sentence or paragraph. You may also want to review what you’ve already said to

determine whether you need to add anything.

Dragon Dictation makes reviewing dictated text and adding new text to the same note

easy.

Dictate your initial text and press Done. Once the text has been processed and appears on

the screen, the red Record button will still be visible at the bottom center of the screen.

When you’re ready to resume dictating, press the Record button and dictate. Once you’re

finished, press the Done button, and your text will be added to the current note.

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How to USE Dragon Dictate on Android

Dragon Dictation is great for every day using, also with Android device. Open the Dragon

Dictation app.

1. Set the Region you are in. It is required to precise the language of recognition.

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2. Choose the Tap and Dictate button and begin to dictate.

3. When you are through, tap the Stop button. You will see a written text of your

message. You can correct it using the keyboard.

4. Now you can copy the text to carry it over to any other app.

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At the same time you may publish the dictated text on Twitter, send a message or an email

with it.

If you want to change the language, go to Settings and choose the right one there. You can

set other features like name recognition here.

Now, let’s run a test and check what this app can actually do.

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Dragon Dictation Test

To make sure that Dragon app is as brilliant as it sounds, we dictated 5 text pieces to check

the quality of recognition.

1. The first one was a short phrase from a famous Lullaby:

Twinkle, twinkle, Little Star.

Great result, but that was easy.

2. The second one was a long and sophisticated tongue twister:

Whether the weather is right, or whether the weather is not

Whether the weather is warm, or whether the weather is hot,

We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather,

Whether we like it or not

As you can see, the written variant is not 100% correct.

3. The third piece is the description of Freemake Blog. We didn’t train these phrases so they

looked natural with pauses and different intonation.

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Freemake Blog is the place where we, Freemake team, share our findings of new and interesting

apps, software and websites across the Web. Here you’ll learn about latest tech trends, visit hot

destinations on the Net, get acquainted with web influencers and laugh at our funny discoveries. Feel

free to contact Freemake Blog team.

Unfortunately, the app fails here.

4. The fourth one is said in Scottish English:

Dinnae fuss, Gonninae dae that!

Which means “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do that”. And it was a complete fail. So as it is

impossible in the general mode, for dialects recognition create a profile and modify Accent.

Well, if you live in Scotland, try to speak general English when you use Dragon Dictation app.

5. And the last one is a French phrase we decided to try a different language.

“J’ai le mal de la Seine” – I adore river the Seine.

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This time the app showed a nice result again.

Dragon Tips and Tricks for Advanced Users

Using Dragon app for a long time but your text leaves much to be desired? Try these tips and

tricks to improve the quality of your speech recognition:

Don’t dictate if the background is noisy.

Position the microphone near your mouth.

Try to use the same volume, pace and tone every time you dictate.

If you want to use punctuation, say the items’ names like comma or full stop.

While dictating, you are welcome to use the following voice commands:

Give me help, Set for Arial (or any other font), Bold that, Delete previous character/5 words,

Spell, Select “Twinkle” (or any other word), New line/paragraph, Undo that, etc.

To see the complete list of commands, ask the Dragon app: “What can I say?”

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The Good:

Dragon App is free for smartphones where you most need it.

It is really fast at typing your words.

Your text can be easily shared on social networks.

Can be used on the go.

The interface is stylish and user-friendly, so you don’t need to be a software pro to use

it.

The app is very useful for students as they can easily epitomize their lectures.

It is as well helpful for language learning as you can obtain a right pronunciation using

it.

The Bad:

No note storage.

You need a reliable Internet connection for dictating.

If you use 3G or 4G, it might lead to expensive network charges.

There is no button to erase all the dictated text so you have to delete it with the

keyboard, which is not so convenient.

The result isn’t always precise.

The proper pronouns are mostly not correct.