A number of people have written me telling me that they are interested in changing the correction commands and other aspects of Dragon NaturallySpeaking which I have described (see How to Change the Correction Commands), but are not comfortable with editing the registry themselves.

To help those people and others, I introduce the AlterNat program.  AlterNat is a utility program which allows you to modify the registry without having to use the registry editor.

You can run AlterNat while Dragon NaturallySpeaking is running or not.  All AlterNat does is make the necessary modifications to your registry.  For some commands, changes made in AlterNat are immediately reflected in the behavior of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  For other commands, because Dragon NaturallySpeaking will only read those registry variables when it initializes, you will have to shut down and then restart Dragon NaturallySpeaking for your changes to take effect.

AlterNat allows you to modify a variety of registry variables, including those registry variables listed as correction commands, and a few others which I have previously not described on these web pages.

To run AlterNat, download the program (AlterNat.zip), and extract the executable AlterNat.exe.  You can put the executable anywhere.  Then run the executable by double-clicking on its name from the Windows Explorer.

AlterNat will display three screens.  The first screen asks you select which version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking you want to modify.  Normally for most people there will only be one version listed, but if you have installed multiple versions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking they should all be listed.

On the second screen, AlterNat will ask you to select the user you want a modify.  You can only modify variables for one user at a time.  Every user which is listed in the registry will be listed in the AlterNat dialog box.

The third screen is where you do all of the work.  A sample display of the screen is shown below.


The third screen lists all of the registry variables which AlterNat allows you to modify.  When you select a registry variable, a brief description of that variable will be displayed at the bottom of the dialog box.

Most variables will display with a blank "Current value".  When the current value is blank, this means that the registry variable has not been changed.  You can override a registry variable by selecting it from the list box, and typing in a new value in the Current value field.  Then you have to click the Change button for the change to take effect.

You can modify as many variables as you would like before clicking Close.

AlterNat is relatively safe.  It will only make modifications to the area of the registry which it knows about.  In the worst case, making an inappropriate change will temporarily disable some feature of Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  And you can undo that affect, by restarting AlterNat, selecting the variable you changed, and deleting the contents of the current value field.  You should not be able to permanently screw up your Dragon NaturallySpeaking configuration by using AlterNat, nor will you lose any of your speech training or vocabulary changes.

IMPORTANT: AlterNat was developed as a utility for people who use Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  The program is (c) Copyright Dragon Systems, Inc. 1998.   There is no support for AlterNat.  Use this program at your own risk.  AlterNat may not be sold or distributed for commercial purposes.