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Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems, and sold by Nuance Communications for Windows personal computers (PCs). It was among the first programs to make speech recognition practical on a PC.

NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal visual interface. Dictated words appear in a floating tooltip as they are spoken, and when the speaker pauses, the program transcribes the words into the active window at the location of the cursor. Like other speech recognition software, NaturallySpeaking has three primary areas of functionality. Dictation, whereby spoken language is transcribed to written text; commands that control, whereby spoken language is recognized as a command to click widgets (controls); and finally text-to-speech whereby written text is converted to synthesized audio stream. Early versions of the software had to be trained for approximately 10 minutes to recognize the user's voice, though version 9 no longer requires the initial training.

Nuance claims that using NaturallySpeaking, writing a 900 word essay would take 6 minutes, while typing 40 words per minute and writing a 900 word essay would take 22 minutes.

History

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NaturallySpeaking has passed through four companies and evolved considerably since its first beginnings in the early 1980s as a research prototype called DRAGON. The married couple Dr. James Baker and Dr. Janet Baker founded Dragon Systems in 1982, deciding to commercialize DRAGON when their funding was cut by DARPA. Their first product DragonDictate was sold for a number of years. Dr. James Baker departed from the conventional AI, and was a pioneer in Hidden Markov models, a way of using statistics for recognition of speech. His wife developed the expert system named Hearsay.

In March of 1990, Dragon Systems began selling DragonDictate (for DOS) at a cost of $9000 for a single-user license. As hardware became less expensive over the next several years the price decreased, and by the time NaturallySpeaking 1.0 was released, the price of DragonDictate for Windows was about $2000. The hardware of the time was not yet powerful enough to address the difficult problem of word segmentation, and was unable to determine the boundaries of words in the continuous signal that constitute human voice. Users had to pronounce one word at a time, each clearly separated by a small pause before the next. DragonDictate is based on a trigram model, and is known as a discrete speech recognition engine.

In 1997 advances in hardware technology allowed NaturallySpeaking version 1.0 to launch as the first available continuous dictation system. During this time the speech recognition industry promoted enthusiastically the notion that speech input was "the" natural modality that would eventually supersede more "primitive" methods such as keyboards. Trying to reach a mass market, vendors dropped prices to levels that were unsustainable.

Lernout & Hauspie bought Dragon Systems in 2000. The dictation system bubble burst in 2001, and Lernout & Hauspie had a spectacular bankruptcy. ScanSoft Inc. bought the rights for Dragon products. In 2005, ScanSoft merged with Nuance Communications , and changed the name of the combined entity to Nuance. This shows a particular drive of the company to move further into the Enterprise speech arena.

The software today is being advertised as potentially up to 99% accurate.

Editions

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There are a range of editions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking, each of which comes with a noise-canceling headset microphone:

• Dragon NaturallySpeaking Standard Edition, which is an entry-level version of the product that enables command and control of the PC, as well as speech-to-text input for email, instant messaging clients and word processing.
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred Edition, which adds robust integration with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, etc.) and Corel WordPerfect, as well as support for digital recorders and Bluetooth headset microphones. This version also allows users to control the formatting of documents by voice (increase font size, set colors, set columns, insert tables, etc.)
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile Edition, which is the Preferred edition with a digital voice recorder. Users can dictate on the recorder, upload the recording to their PC, and have Dragon NaturallySpeaking convert the recording into a text or Microsoft Word document.
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional Edition, which adds robust support for custom voice commands (where the user can associate a word or phrase to pre-defined text or graphics) and scripting (which enables automated operation and integration with more specialized applications such as electronic medical records and case management applications.)
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional Medical and Professional Legal, which are versions of the Professional edition with extended vocabularies for those domains.
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking Client and Server Developer Toolkits (SDK's), which are used by commercial and in-house developers to integrate speech with their applications. This can include front-end speech recognition (adding speech input to the application) and back-end speech recognition (batch processing of recorded speech for search, transcription or other application areas).

Versions

See also

• List of commercial speech recognition programs

References

1. Sindya N. Bhanoo. July 16, 2007. Language quest moves to Hopkins: Speech-to-text technology expert joins defense work. Baltimore Sun. Retrieved on July 20, 2007.

External links

• Official website

• Articles needing cleanup from April 2008
• Articles with sections that need to be turned into prose from April 2008
• Windows software
• Assistive technology
• Speech recognition
• Speech-to-text