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This video is a brief introduction to Dragon voice recognition software. Dragon converts spoken words into electronic text

By the end of this video you'll be familiar with the Dragon toolbar, you will have learned about different microphones. You will know what a voice profile is and how to create one, you'll also learn some basic tips for dictating with Dragon and you will know how to add words to dragon's vocabulary and how to make corrections. There will be other things you'll learn along the way as well.

When you start dragon for the first time you'll be asked to create a voice profile. Follow the steps and make sure you select the right region and accent for you.With older versions of Dragon the options for accents are limited by the region that you select. For example, under the region of Australia, there is just one default accent available. However, if you select the region of United States, there are a number of accents available. Explore these options and make sure you select the accent that is appropriate for you. Make sure that you select the right audio device that you're dictating with.

Position the microphone as instructed. And read this text out loud at a pace and at a volume that you're comfortable with.

This will allow the software to adjust to the volume of your voice. Once you've started dragon its toolbar will appear at the top of the screen. When you place your cursor over the toolbar it expands, when you move it away it contracts. You can change the look of the toolbar by going to the toolbar menu and exploring one of the other options. For today's video we'll be using the new Dragon toolbar.

There are a range of different microphones that you can use with Dragon. The one in this picture is a headset that connects via USB.Bluetooth microphones are also available. If you have difficulty using a headset due to movement restrictions you might like to consider a microphone that you can place on your desktop and move close to your mouth.

To find a microphone that's right for your needs do a web search for "voice recognition compatible microphones". Now you've set up your microphone and your voice profile it's time to start dictating. Let's dictate into a Microsoft Word document. When you do dictate it's important to dictate at a pace and at a volume that's natural to you. Let's start. I'm going to go to this microphone icon in the toolbar and click on it. You will notice that it goes green. That means it's ready for dictation. This is an example of how you can dictate using dragon software. You can see that I'm talking at a pace and at a volume that is natural. When dictating with dragon, it's best to dictate a number of words at a time instead of dictating one word at a time  -- Dragon seems to work much better this way. I've just clicked on the microphone icon again, and it's gone red. That means the microphone is off. You don't have to click on the microphone to turn it on and off if you don't want to; you can use voice commands. If I say "go to sleep", it will deactivate the microphone if I say "wake up" it will activate the microphone. Let's give that a go: "go to sleep". You can see that the microphone has turned a different color. "Wake up". "Go to sleep"

Let's continue with a bit more dictation. Wake up, new paragraph. I prefer using voice recognition software rather than typing by a keyboard, full stop. Go to sleep.

Now you might be wondering why dragon didn't type the words "go to sleep" when I said them. Well, that's because I paused slightly before saying "go to sleep". When you pause before saying "go to sleep". Dragon knows that those words are words that are commands rather than words to be dictated. You will have noticed that I used punctuation when dictating. I used "full stop" and I also used "em-bash" -- and I also used "new paragraph" for when I wanted a new paragraph.

Dragons help menu contains more information about punctuation and other things to do with dragon. Go to the toolbar select and "help", "help" topics. Let's type in "punctuation". Let's select "punctuation marks and other characters you can dictate" And you can see that there's a list of symbols along with their corresponding commands. The help menu is very important to get to know with Dragon. You'll learn more about dictation and your accuracy will improve.

Adding new words and making corrections is very important when using dragon, it will increase its accuracy. I'm going to give an example.I'm a student at RMIT University full stop.

Instead of writing "RMIT" the software has written "RM I to"

Now it's very unlikely that the word or that acronym "RMIT" is in Dragons vocabulary. So what we're going to do is we're going to add it directly. We're going to do that by going up to the toolbar and select "vocabulary". We'll select "add new word". We'll type in "RMIT". We will leave this tick box selected. "I want to train the pronunciation of this word". We'll click "add" and I'm going to say "RMIT" three times to give it three samples of my voice. RMIT RMIT RMIT

Okay, let's see how we go now when I dictate the same sentence.

I'm a student at RMIT University full stop. Okay, so the software wrote "RMIT" correctly because we added it to its vocabulary and we trained it to my voice.

You can also add words to Dragon's vocabulary via the correction process. I'm going to give an example. Last night I went to Etihad Stadium to watch the football full stop.

So you can see that the software has written "Eddie had" instead of "Etihad" Let's correct that via dragon's correction process.

Correct "Eddie had"

What the software has now done is that it's listed words that, it so to speak, thinks are correct words.None of them are. We're going to select "spell that". What I'll do now is I'll type in the correct spelling of the word.

By following the corrections process you're giving dragon the spellings of words that might not be in its vocabulary. In addition what you're doing is you're giving dragon information about your voice -- so if you pronounce a word a particular way

you're providing dragon information that will assist it in getting the word correct next time you dictate it. The corrections process is a very important step to follow.

Your voice profile is really important when thinking about dragon. It contains all the new words that you've added to the Dragon vocabulary and it contains information about your voice that you've added whenever you've made a correction. For that reason it's really important to have a backup of your voice profile on a drive that is external to your computer. You can do that by going to the toolbar clicking on "profile"

Go to "manage user profile" select your profile go to "advanced". Select "export" and browse for a location external to your computer -- that way you will have a backup in case anything goes wrong.

So that's a basic introduction to Dragon voice recognition software. Now don't forget about the help menu because you learn a whole lot more about the product. If you're a Mac user there's a version of the product for Macs and also, if you're a student who's studying a medical related field or a legal related field there is a version of the product that has a vocabulary for those areas. So look out for that. All the best with voice dictation!

ClaroRead is a text-to-speech app. In other words it reads electronic text out loud in a lifelike voice. In this video you'll learn how to customize ClaroRead''s voice and playback settings for your needs. You will learn how to use ClaroRead to read a word document, a PDF document and a web page. You'll also learn how to convert inaccessible documents into a format that is readable by ClaroRead. You'll learn how to use ClaroRead's screen ruler and finally, you'll learn how to convert electronic text into an mp3 file.

Let's start ClaroRead. We'll go to the Start menu. Select "ClaroRead Plus". ClaroRead starts up. You'll see that it's toolbar appears. We will click in the document that we're using and the toolbar will then go to the top of the screen.

Here's an example of how ClaroRead reads electronic text. I'm going to use this extract from "War of the Worlds". I place my cursor where I want it to read. I click "play".

ClaroRead: "No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century"

I click "stop" for it to stop. Now you can change the gender of the voice, the speed of the voice -- you can also change the higlighting. Let's have a look in "settings".

At the moment the voice is set to "Australian Karen". Let's test it.

ClaroRead: "This is a test of the current voice"

Instructor: You can see that I can change it to "Australian Lee"

ClaroRead: "This is a test of the current voice"

Instructor: There are also other options available, I'm going to use "Australian Karen"

If I want to change the speed of the voice I can make it faster.

ClaroRead: "This is a test of the current voice"

Instructor: I can make it slower.

ClaroRead: "This is a test of the current voice"

Instructor: There are options to pause between words,stop after a sentence that's read, as well as to speak a word that's being hovered over.

Let's go into "advanced speech".

When the software is reading the electronic text I can have it to highlight one word at a time. I can have it highlight a trail of words, or I can have it highlighted sentence. High lighting no words or highlighting a whole paragraph are also options. Let's click "sentence" and see what it looks like.

ClaroRead:"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century"

Instructor: Ok, let's go back to "settings", let's click on "word" and see what it looks like.

ClarodRead:"No one would have believed, in the last years of the"

Instructor: Also, if you want to change the background color you can do that as well.

Let's click on "foreground" first of all, and this time we'll select "yellow". For "background", let's have a look and we can select any of these colors here. Let's select "blue" Let's see what that looks like.

ClaroRead:"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth"

Instructor: Explore these options to get the voice that you like, the speed that you like and so that playback highlights the words just as you want it to.ClaroRead reads Word documents, PDFs and web pages. I have a Word document opened in front of me.

I have the cursor placed at the beginning of it, I click "play",

ClaroRead:"No one would have believed in the last year"

Instructor: I click "stop" and it stops reading. Let's have a look at a PDF document.

Again I place the cursor at the beginning of the text I want to have read, I click "play".

ClaroRead: "The planet Mars. I"

Instructor: I press "stop" and it stops reading.

Let's go to Internet Explorer. I'm going to place my cursor at the beginning of text that I want to have read.

You'll notice that it reads the title of the document first before reading the text that I have the cursor in front of.

ClaroRead:"The War of The Worlds. Book One. The secular cooling that must some day overtake our planet"

Instructor: "Also, if you select the text

ClaroRead:"And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought"

Instructor: ClaroRead will also read it back to you.

Let's go and have a look at Google Chrome. In this case, if I place the cursor at the beginning of the text that I want to have read

ClaroRead is not reading it. What I have to do is I have to select the text.

ClaroRead:"The secular cooling that must some day overtake our planet has already gone far indeed with our neighbor"

Instructor: I click "stop" to stop it reading.So ClaroRead reads a number of different file formats relatively easily. You just need to remember that for some documents you need to select the text to have it read to you.

Some documents such as image PDFs cannot be read immediately by ClaroRead  or any other screen reading software.What you do need to do, you need to convert the document into an accessible format. I'm going to show you how to do that.

So in front of me, I have an inaccessible PDF or an image PDF -- is sometimes what it's called.

I can tell that it's inaccessible by clicking on it and you'll see that the whole document changes color. If I try to place my cursor in the text it doesn't allow me to do it.

ClaroRead has a scan function that allows you to scan it into an accessible format.Let's go to the toolbar. There are a number of options here: "scan from paper", "scan from PDF" and "scan from screen" What we're going to do is we go to "scan from the PDF file"

First of all, make sure you close the document that you're going to scan. Go to "scan". "Scan from PDF/file". Search for the document, in this case, I've called it "image PDF"

ClaroRead  has now brought up its preview screen. In this screen

there are a number of options to edit the text that you've scanned.  In this case because the text was fairly straightforward; it was just in one single column -- it was fairly easy --and there's no editing required.

I'm going to go to "save as" I'm going to select "word document" and now I'll click "Save". So I've opened up the document that's been converted -- it's in a Microsoft Word format.

You can see I can place my cursor in it and if I press "Play"

ClaroRead: "No one would have believed in the last years of" the software plays are back. It is an accessible document now.

The "extras menu" provides more functions with ClaroRead , let's select "Screen Ruler".

You can see that under "mode" I have ruler selected and the color as yellow when I move my cursor down the page you can see that a yellow ruler follows it. It assists me in focusing on each line of text as I am reading it.I can change the size of the ruler. I can change its opacity. And I can also change its color.

If we select "underline", you will see that a line now follows the cursor down the screen.Again, this can assist me in focusing on each line of text that I am reading.I can change the size of the line, the color of the line, its opacity. I can also put shade above the line or below it. Let's select "shade below the line"

You can see that this now really provides emphasis to the area of text that I'm reading or that I have read.

If we select "overlay" you can see that a color has now overlaid across the entire screen. You can change the color. You can change its opacity.

If you want to minimize the screen ruler  menu just click on the minimize button -- it will now appear in the hidden icons.

ClaroRead  will convert electronic text into an mp3 file. I'm going to give an example using this document. Converting electronic text to mp3 files tends to work best when the document is a Word document and when it's in one single column just like this one is. So what I'll do is I'll select all, because I want all the text to be converted into an mp3 file,

I'll go to the toolbar, the settings menu. I'll click "save as audio file" I've selected where I want it saved to. I'll click "save".

ClaroRead  is now converting the word document to an mp3 file.

So here's the file we just converted. I'll click on "play".

ClaroRead:"No one would have believed in the last years of the ninteenth century that"

Instructor: You might like to give it a go. Listening to readings on an mp3 file could work for you.

So that's an introduction to Claro read! Don't forget to use the help menu to find out more about text to speech with ClaroRead. All the best using text-to-speech software!