Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS) is a

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

software package developed by Dragon Systems of

Newton, Massachusetts Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is located roughly west of Downtown Boston, and comprises a patchwork of thirteen villages. The city borders Boston to the northeast and southeast (via the neighborhoods of ...

, which was acquired in turn by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products,

Nuance Communications Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its comp ...

, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. It runs on

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s. Version 15 (Professional Individual and Legal Individual), which supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of

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, 8 and 10, was released in August 2016.

Features

Dragon NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal user interface. As an example, dictated words appear in a floating

tooltip The tooltip, also known as infotip or hint, is a common graphical user interface (GUI) element in which, when hoverbox, hovering over a screen element or component, a text box displays information about that element, such as a description of a ...

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: voice recognition in dictation with speech transcribed as written text, recognition of spoken commands, and

text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...

: speaking text content of a document. Voice profiles can be accessed by different computers in a networked environment, although the audio hardware and configuration must be identical to those of the machine generating the configuration. 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. In 1982 he and Dr. Janet M. 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

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, and utilized

hidden Markov model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a Markov model in which the observations are dependent on a latent (or ''hidden'') Markov process (referred to as X). An HMM requires that there be an observable process Y whose outcomes depend on the outcomes of X ...

s, a probabilistic method for temporal

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...

. At the time, the hardware was not powerful enough to address the problem of

word segmentation A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its ...

, and DragonDictate was unable to determine the boundaries of words during continuous speech input. Users were forced to enunciate one word at a time, clearly separated by a small pause after each word. 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. The company was then purchased in June 2000 by Lernout & Hauspie, a Belgium-based corporation that was subsequently found to have been perpetrating financial fraud. Following the all-share deal advised by

Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services company. Founded in 1869, Goldman Sachs is headquartered in Lower Manhattan in New York City, with regional headquarters in many internationa ...

, Lernout & Hauspie declared bankruptcy in November 2000. The deal was not originally supposed to be all stock and the unavailability of the Goldman Sachs team to advise concerning the change in terms was one of the grounds of the Bakers' subsequent lawsuit. The Bakers had received stock worth hundreds of millions of US dollars, 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 in January 2013 led to a 23-day trial in Boston. The jury cleared Goldman Sachs of all charges. Following the bankruptcy of Lernout & Hauspie, the rights to the Dragon product line were acquired by

ScanSoft Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its compe ...

Burlington, Massachusetts Burlington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 26,377 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. History It is believed that Burlington takes its name from the English town of Bridlington, York ...

, also a Goldman Sachs client. In 2005 ScanSoft launched a ''de facto'' acquisition of

, and rebranded itself as Nuance. As of 2012, LG Smart TVs included voice recognition feature powered by the same speech engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. In 2014, following the discontinuation of DragonDictate for Mac, a product dating back to Nuance's 2010 purchase of MacSpeech Dictate, NaturallySpeaking gained Mac compatibility, though Mac support was later terminated in 2018. In 2021,

announced plans to acquire Nuance, and therefore Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The acquisition completed in March 2022.

Versions

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 is available in the following languages; UK English, US English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese (aka "Dragon Speech 11" in Japan).

Notes

References

External links

* at Nuance Communications
Dragon Medical SpeechKit
(DMSK) at

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