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# Recognition Preferences Pane

If Show Recognition Window When Dictating is checked, the Recognition window will open automatically when you are dictating in Dictation mode or Spelling mode as soon as the insertion point is within or after a phrase capable of being trained. Usually this will be as soon as you dictate anything.

If Close Recognition Window After Each Choice is checked, the Recognition window will close automatically as soon as you use it to replace a dictated phrase with its correct alternative.

If Show Smart Format Rules is checked, Dragon will open the smart formatting window after you’ve made a correction, enabling you to tell the software how to automatically handle the change in the future. Next to "Maximum Number of Recognition Alternatives," you can enter a number, up to 25.

Use Maximum Number of Alternatives to set the number of alternatives shown in the Recognition window. Fewer alternatives might be shown (as few as one, in fact), depending on how certain Dragon Dictate feels about its interpretation of what you said.

### Recognition Behavior

Use the slider to trade off between speed and accuracy of speech recognition.

The middle (50) is a good initial setting, but given the speed of today’s Intel-based machines you can probably opt for more accuracy with no appreciable increase in response time. Feel free to experiment. After you’ve done a good deal of dictation and honed your voice model using the Recognition window, Dragon Dictate will probably be both faster and more accurate, so you can then afford to move the slider to the right a bit.

### Auto Sleep

Use the slider to set the length of time before the microphone goes to sleep and no longer recognizes input. While you can use the Go To Sleep or Microphone Off commands to accomplish the same thing, the Auto Sleep feature is useful if you are frequently interrupted or simply prefer not to use those commands.

You can set the length of time for Auto Sleep at anywhere from 30 seconds to five minutes, or never.