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Training Custom Words is Usually Not Needed
The Dragon Masters recommend AVOIDING training custom vocabulary entries. Usually providing written\\spoken forms avoids the need to train such custom vocabulary entries, and is more maintainable because you do not need to retrain them when you create a new profile and import the custom words that you saved earlier.
From KnowBrainer forum Do I need to train custom phrases?.
TBD: edit to make more freestanding.
Piling on:
Lunis' advice to avoid training was one of the best things I picked up from this forum.
As was Alan's advice to use whatever Dragon came up with when specifying a spoken form.
Minor tweak: I do this when the misrecognition that Dragon came up with is uncommon[*] or something I would rarely say, e.g. Lunis' example "USB pod\\USB pot". Probably more often I use "pseudo-phonetic" spoken forms.
TBD: refactor as separate wiki page?
Doing this when the misrecognition is more common can cause problems. E.g. I use a lot of open source software, including the mail reader Gnus in GNU EMACS. When I say "Gnus" Dragon often comes up with "news" or "good news", depending on whether I pronounce the G and how much I emphasize it. I don't want a custom form "Gnus\\good news", since I occasionally use the phrase "good news".
So I have custom forms "Gnus\\guh news" and "Gnus\\guh nooz" [*] -- the "guh" for G requires more emphasis than I would naturally use, but is not too bad. I am willing to adapt my pronunciation somewhat to improve speech recognition.
Which brings me to my own piece of advice: I have had pretty good success creating "pseudo-phonetic" spoken forms, like "guh nooz". note that neither "guh" nor "nooz" are written forms recognized in my vocabulary. Dragon warns about this, saying "The vocabulary does not contain the following word. If the word is spelled as you intended, click OK and the program will give it an approximate pronunciation." this works well enough. there is no need to add "guh" as a custom word. Dragon does not added as a written form.
I find it useful to ask Dragon to "read that" back when I am trying to find a pseudo-phonetic spoken form.
As for acronyms: Lunis and Leslie advise using words like "bee" instead of "B" in the spoken form, but I have found exactly the opposite - better recognition when I use the letters. However, I find that it does not work to separate the letters in the spoken form "XYZZY\\X Y Z Z Y". I get better results when the letters are grouped e.g. "XYZZY\\XY ZZ Y". Typically pairs, although pre-existing forms like "XYZ" also work. I don't need to provide all possible groupings.
BTW, at first Dragon gave me "XYZ Z why", and I might very well have used that as the spoken form. But the grouped letter form works, and is easier to search for.
I nearly always find it better to have a naked acronym form as well as the broken up acronym form, e.g. "XYZZY" in addition to "XYZZY\\XXY ZZ Y"
Pseudo-Phonetic versus Disambiguating Spoken Forms
Of course, I also consider compounds like "GNU EMACS" and "Gnus mailreader" - more context => better recognition - but I prefer to avoid this whenever possible, to avoid vocabulary bloat. Similarly "Gnus\\Gnus as in mail reader" and "Gnus\\Gnus with G". Sometimes useful, but custom vocabulary entries where the written form appears in the spoken form can cause problems.
TBD: Refactor As Separate Wiki Page?
Note *: BTW, I have "Gnus\\guh news" and "Gnus\\guh nooz", i.e. "nooz" as well as "news", because I seldom pronounce the words "news" as "nooz", but do pronounce "Gnus" that way before I started emphasizing the G to handle Dragon. My natural pronunciation of "news" is more like the Dutch "nieuw" followed by a Z sound. I have tried doing "Gnus\\nooz", but that causes problems for ordinary "news".
Git vs Get: nooz vs news is much like Dragon's insistence that "git" with a hard G be recognized as "get". AFAIK "git"-->"get" is an American regionalism. Perhaps Dragon might not do this if I were using a British or Canadian vocabulary, but I really need American spellings with mostly Canadian pronunciation.
WISH: I wish that Dragon and any hypothetical future speech recognition tools provided anti-training or distinction training: e.g. train "git" and "get" together, so that the speech recognition system learns the distinction. E.g. when I say alternate saying "git get git get git..." I do not want to get "get get get ..." the way I currently do.