Roughly a month ago, a short exchange came up on Twitter between Jeromobot, NAJIT Observer and me, on how to customize vocabulary while using Swype as your speech recognition tool in one of the mobile+computer workflows described elsewhere on this blog.
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words and I’m in a lazy mood, so I’ll let them just do that.
In this case, I’m simply trying to dictate a word into the body of an e-mail on my phone, in Portuguese (“iscnofonia”– one of several terms for describing weakness of the voice).
Pick a random block of text – well, not so random, but the words you want to add.
Select the entire text using the usual function on your phone and press the Swype button (the little hand with the trail).
Now the option for you to add all words to the dictionary comes along. Use it.
1. The dictionary is valid for all languages. If I change the speech recognition engine to English or German, it still picks up that word. Something to take into consideration when you work with multiple languages, as you may get false results.
2. This requires that you interface a bit more with your phone to add the vocabulary, but once you’ve done it, it is there and you back up the dictionary and sync it between devices. This is accessible through the options in the Swype app.