Dragon NaturallySpeaking - Dragon Software

Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS), is a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, which merged with Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products and was later acquired by Nuance Communications, formerly known as ScanSoft. It runs on Windows personal computers. The most recent package is version 15 (Professional Individual and Legal Individual), which supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, 8 and Windows 10. The macOS version is called Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, version 6 or Dragon for Mac.

Features

NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal user interface. As an example, dictated words appear in a floating tooltip as they are spoken (though there is an option to suppress this display to increase speed), and when the speaker pauses, the program transcribes the words into the active window at the location of the cursor (Dragon does not support dictating to background windows). The software has three primary areas of functionality: dictation, text-to-speech, and command input. The user is able to dictate and have speech transcribed as written text, have a document synthesized as an audio stream, or issue commands that are recognized as such by the program. In addition, voice profiles can be accessed through different computers in a networked environment , although the audio hardware and configuration must be identical on both machines. The Professional version allows creation of custom commands to control programs or functions not built into NaturallySpeaking.

History

Dr. James Baker laid out the description of a speech understanding system called DRAGON in 1975. Then in 1982 he and Dr. Janet Baker, his wife, founded Dragon Systems to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype. He was President of the company and she was CEO.

DragonDictate was first released for DOS, and utilized hidden Markov models, a probabilistic method for temporal pattern recognition. At the time, the hardware was insufficiently powerful to address the problem of word segmentation, and DragonDictate was unable to determine the boundaries of words during continuous speech input. Users were forced to pronounce one word at a time, each clearly separated by a small pause. DragonDictate was based on a trigram model, and is known as a discrete utterance speech recognition engine.

Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997.

Joel Gould was the director of emerging technologies at Dragon Systems. Gould was the principal architect and lead engineer for the development of Dragon NaturallyOrganized (1.0), Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organizer (3.52), Dragon NaturallySpeaking (1.0 through 2.02), and DragonDictate for Windows (1.0). Gould also designed the tutorials in both DragonDictate for DOS version 2.0 and Dragon Talk.

The company was then purchased in June 2000 by Lernout & Hauspie, a Belgium-based corporation that had been involved in financial scandals. Following the all-share deal advised by Goldman Sachs, Lernout & Hauspie declared bankruptcy in November 2000. The Bakers had received hundreds of millions in stock, but were only able to sell a few million dollars worth before the stock lost all its value as a result of the accounting fraud. The Bakers sued Goldman Sachs for negligence, intentional misrepresentation and breach of fiduciary duty, which eventually (January, 2013) led to a 23-day trial in Boston. The jury ruled in favor of Goldman Sachs and cleared Goldman Sachs of all charges. Following the bankruptcy of Lernout & Hauspie, the rights to the Dragon product line were acquired by ScanSoft of Burlington, Massachusetts. In 2005, ScanSoft launched a de facto acquisition of Nuance Communications, and rebranded itself as Nuance.

From 2012, LG Smart TVs include voice recognition feature powered by the same speech engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Versions

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 is available in the following languages

• US English
• UK English
• French
• German
• Italian
• Spanish
• Dutch
• Japanese (aka "Dragon Speech 11" in Japan)