As I dictate text, paragraph by paragraph, Dragon Naturally Speaking uses a capital letter for each new phrase, even though I have not commanded a capital letter.

Any suggestions as to how I can overcome this glitch?


LeighWillaston

Leigh,

Silly question but worth a punt - have you tried saying CAPS OFF and are you using normal mode or dictation only mode?

As Martin says, worth setting up a new user just to see if the problem goes away...

Something else occured to me - is auto punctuation enabled in options? a pause between phrases could be taken as a new sentence, causing the cap letter to appear... just a thought.

Let us know :-)

Ross

Leigh,

I'm wondering if you're confusing that which is a normal function of NaturallySpeaking, and has always been so.

DNS contains one or called "Structured commands". These commands are located in the Vocabulary Editor and included such commands as; all punctuation commands, line and paragraph commands, special symbols, etc.

The paragraph and line commands (i.e., New-Paragraph, Next-Paragraph, New-Line, Next-Line) are all set with "Word Properties", accessible by clicking on the Properties button in the Vocabulary Editor. The properties for paragraphs are set to "Format the next word: Capitalized". Therefore, any time that you issue a paragraph command, the first word of the next sentence or phrase will always be capitalized.

Next-Line and New-Line utilize the option for normal capitalization. However, the problem that you're experiencing is a normal function of DNS in that after any terminal punctuation mark [i.e., ( . ), ( ? ), ( ! )] The next word is always capitalized because this is proper and standard grammar. Keep in mind that Dragon NaturallySpeaking is based on structured language, not conversational speech. Therefore, it is set up and designed to follow the basic rules of grammar relative to capitalization after punctuation.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of wanting your cake and eating it too. You can't have it both ways. Speech recognition does not understand grammar or meaning. It is not capable of understanding speech the way people do. Therefore, at some point programmers for speech recognition had to make some basic decisions regarding how capitalization and punctuation work in normal structured speech and writing. If you dictate something that follows punctuation that you do not want capitalized, simply say "no caps that" immediately after you dictate something what you do not want capitalized. Keep in mind that these types of commands act on utterances vs. individual words. Therefore, if you pause between dictating certain words and the first word that you spoke before the first pause is the one that you want uncapitalized, you need to select that word before saying "no caps that."

I think you just need to get used to how speech recognition works. This is not an issue with just Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it is the same in all speech recognition programs (i.e., ViaVoice, WSR (Windows Speech Recognition) etc. ad infinitum. It has always been this way since the first commercial speech recognition program was introduced by Dragon Systems almost 15 years ago. I was privileged at one point to be the SDK and Technical Solutions Project Manager for Dragon NaturallySpeaking so I know how speech recognition was originally designed and how it works, as well as why. If you have any specific questions about how to perform a specific operation relative to the problem that you're experiencing, please let me know. If you can be specific and detailed, then I can give you a very specific and detailed answer.

Chuck Runquist
GEMCCON - The Choice of Intelligence
Speech Recognition Consulting and Training

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. - Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)