In this paper, with the aid of symbolic computation, we investigate the generalized nonlinear Schrödinger Maxwell–Bloch equation, which describes the propagation of the optical soliton through an inhomogeneous two-level dielectric tapered fiber medium. By virtue of the Darboux transformation method, two-soliton solutions are generated based on the constructed Lax pair and figures are plotted to illustrate the properties of the obtained solutions. Moreover, through manipulating the dispersion and nonlinearity profiles, various soliton control systems are investigated which is promising for potential applications in the design of soliton compressor, soliton amplification and high-speed optical devices in ultralarge capacity transmission systems. This means that we are able to control the soliton types with suitably selected values of the parameters. Additionally more soliton control techniques are proposed and investigated. We expect that the above analysis could be observed in future experiments.