Is the Medical Edition of DNS 9 worth buying?
Submitted by Antony on Thu, 02/15/2007 - 11:26.
Hi everyone - I'm new to the forum but have been a user of DNS 7 for a couple of years (due to problems with RSI).
I'll be starting medical school in September, and was wondering if it would be a worthwhile investment to pay out for the Medical Edition of Dragon. Is this edition truly necessary for the recognition of medical vocabulary, or can the preferred edition somehow be made to suffice?
Any input greatly appreciated!
Hi, Good question. I have a
Hi,
Good question. I have a copy of prefered 9 and have (with a lot of training) turned it into a medical whiz. heres what I did. buy prefered 9. then jump on the net and google for "medical terms list" and "pharmocological terms/names list". You will find heaps. cut and paste em into word docs and store them away in a folder marked Medical terms etc.
This may take some time but is actually really satisfying.
Then once you have version 9 you can run those medical lists thru "add words from documents" which is found under tools. make sure you tell the machine show the words it doesn't know.You can then go thru and tick/check the ones you want( more the better trust me).then there is a train button, all the checked ones you can train by speaking and it will do one after the other. Once trained a med word it seldom gets it wrong.Right so my total time training inclusive of cutting from the net and voice training was about 11 hours for 7200+ medical and pharmocological terms.
It works really well and seems to know a hell of alot about medicine.U need to weigh that up against splashing out for medical( which I haven't used). Also voiceperfect.com and KnowBrainer seem to have add on medical vocabs which they mey like to comment on.
If your gonna train V9 then train as much as you can, inclusive of all blood value abbreviations, surgical proceedures as well. Even if you don't think u will ever come accross a proceedure or medication its great to have Nat speak know it when it inevidibly comes up.
PS if you train it then plase please back up and save your user files in a nice safe place.
Cheers
Ren.
ren wrote: I have a copy of
I have a copy of prefered 9 and have (with a lot of training) turned it into a medical whiz. heres what I did. buy prefered 9. then jump on the net and google for "medical terms list" and "pharmocological terms/names list". You will find heaps. cut and paste em into word docs and store them away in a folder marked Medical terms etc.
I think similar procedures could be done for any specialized terms. If people want to share their lists, they can be put here for download. Contact me privately using the Contact Us form and we'll talk about it!
The downfall of this could be in specialized forms requirements that a particular profession may have. The Legal profession comes to mind for this. However I'm sure where there's a will there's a way!
Skip
I have been using DNS 9 Pref
I have been using DNS 9 Pref for medical work. I think all the medical words are already in the back-up dictionary, or whatever you call it, in a dormant state. Whenever I use a medical word that is mis-transcribed, I almost always find the correct word in the correction list. The correct word may not show up until you've typed in the first two or three letters, but it's almost always there.
I just dictated "hypophyseal," a word you commonly don't use outside of medicine. DNS got it wrong. During correction, "hypophyseal" showed up as a choice by the time I got "hypop" typed in...along with "hypophysectomy" and "hypophysectomize"
So, you get all the words in DNS. You just have to dig 'em out, so to speak.
Medical also formats stuff in a medical way, but you can fix that by using macros (commands) in DNS9
Stan
Everyone has posted
Everyone has posted some well-thought-out advice on how to turn NaturallySpeaking Preferred into NaturallySpeaking Medical but there are also disadvantages to taking this approach.
You may find NaturallySpeaking Medical to be a bit expensive but it definitely has advantages. For beginners, NaturallySpeaking Medical utilizes language modeling; not vocabularies. The best you can hope for in the Preferred 9 is to run the Vocabulary Builder and add missing words to your vocabulary. This is definitely worth doing but far from ideal. Language modeling is much more than an alphabetical listing of words. Language modeling includes acronyms, commonly used medical phrases and takes advantage of the Vocabulary Editor's Written Form/Spoken Form. It simply isn't possible to duplicate all of this work in NaturallySpeaking Preferred and even if you are able to obtain fairly high accuracy, you're going to have to really work for it which brings up another question: What is your time worth?
As far as backup vocabulary is concerned, a good deal of modern medicine can only be obtained through professional language models. However some companies do offer medical vocabularies for Preferred.
Medical 9 also includes additional amenities such as an industrial-strength Vocabulary Builder better known as VocTools. Preferred 9 lacks this capability. Medical 9 also includes sophisticated macro capabilities and although this can be duplicated by various third parties, if price isn't a factor, Medical 9 is the hands-down winner. We are not saying that you need to purchase Medical 9 but rather pointing out the pros and cons of both options.
KnowBrainer Support Staff - Lunis Orcutt
Dictated with DNS 9, KnowBrainer and UniVoice
To see additional responses visit the KnowBrainer Technical Support Phorum
Thanks for the excellent
Thanks for the excellent advice. The added functions of the Medical Edition sound like they'll be useful when I finally practice medicine (e.g. using macros to produce set format documents, such as patient notes), but I think that I'll start by following Ren's advice about building up the existing medical vocabulary of the Preferred edition - probably the best option for a poor student!
Next step - upgrade to DNS 9 (probably after upgrading my current 512 RAM).
Cheers,
Antony