Starting to Dictate with Dragon Professional Individual

By Stephanie Diamond

Part of Dragon Professional Individual For Dummies Cheat Sheet

After you have installed Dragon Professional Individual on a computer with all the necessary system requirements and performed the initial training, you’re on the road to a beautiful friendship with your assistant. Take the following steps.

  1. Launch Professional Individual by Choosing Start→Programs→Dragon →Dragon.

    You can use Dragon Professional Individual with a large number of applications. If you intend to use Professional Individual with another application, launch that application at this point, too.

  2. Put on your headset, and make sure the microphone is positioned as it was during initial training.

    The microphone should be positioned about a half-inch away from one corner of your mouth, off to the side. It should never be directly in front of your mouth.

  3. Turn the microphone on.

    The microphone icon in the system tray needs to be green, in order for you to dictate. If the icon is red, click it to become green.

    The microphone icon in the toolbar of the Dragon Professional Individual DragonBar works exactly the same way as the icon in the system tray. Make sure one of these is open and ready for you to dictate.

  4. Click where you want the text to go if the cursor isn’t already there.

    Or select (highlight) text that you want to replace with dictated text.

  5. Speak carefully, just as you did when you read the text aloud to Dragon Professional Individual during the initial training. Don’t rush, and don’t speak the words with . . . spaces . . . between . . . them.

    As you speak, Dragon Professional Individual shows you your dictation.