Dragon speech recognition software already has a high level of accuracy when you first start using it. In the past, it would take a few weeks for the software to adjust to the nuances of your voice with the help of correction and customisation in order to get to the point of being able to use the product efficiently. Nowadays, Dragon learns from your usage as it goes along, delivering extraordinary results from day one.
As quickly as Dragon can start performing right out of the box, it also takes time and effort to create a solid voice profile. You want the software to continue to learn from you with an aim of getting to 99% accuracy. If a word isn’t in the vocabulary, then there’s no chance of getting it right. This is why it’s so important to build your custom vocabulary as you go along. This takes time, many corrections, training and even some special workarounds for problematic words.
The time taken to craft your voice profile is the time that you may lose if the voice profile becomes corrupt. This is why it’s useful to protect your profile’s learnings and have a backup available so that you can get back up to speed as soon as possible. Life happens, which means that for whatever reason you may be in a position where you need to get a good version of your profile and restore it to continue using Dragon.
Another curious situation can happen when you are using two computers simultaneously. Since Dragon is installed locally to your hard drive in most instances, it means that your voice profile is not roaming. This means that your profile will develop at different rates if you’re using two computers, depending on which one you give preference. It’s a good idea to identify which of the two profiles is the superior one and at least in the earliest days to make sure that you have the most established one as your primary profile.
To do this you will need to make a copy of your profile on the one machine and export it to the other machine to keep it up-to-date. While this is quite important in your first few months of using Dragon, you will get to a point where both profiles are very similarly matched and this will no longer be necessary.
Still, it’s a good idea to have a copy of your profile stored on an external hard drive, flash drive or cloud drive just to make sure that you have a decent backup plan in the event that you need to refer back to one of these profiles. If you are in the position where you have lost your profile due to corruption, it’s good to know that it won’t take too long to get back on track with a new profile.