Dragon Voice Recognition System

1. Dragon Medical Voice Recognition Software
2. Voice Recognition System
3. Dragon Voice Software

Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS)^[1] is a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, which was acquired first by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products and later by Nuance Communications. It runs on Windowspersonal computers. Version 15 (Professional Individual and Legal Individual),^[2] which supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, 8 and 10, was released in August 2016.^[3][4] The macOS version is called Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, version 6^[5] or Dragon for Mac.

Features[edit]

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

Dragon SDK Client (DSC) Edition Integrate the speech recognition capabilities of Dragon NaturallySpeaking into any Windows application without using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking user interface. Dragon SDK Client (DSC) Edition Integrate the speech recognition capabilities of Dragon NaturallySpeaking into any Windows application without using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

History[edit]

Dr. James Baker laid out the description of a speech understanding system called DRAGON in 1975.^[6] In 1982 he and Dr. Janet M. Baker, his wife, founded Dragon Systems to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype.^[7] 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 not powerful enough 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 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.^[8]

Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997.^[9]

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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[10] Following the all-share deal advised by Goldman Sachs, 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.^[11] Following the bankruptcy of Lernout & Hauspie, the rights to the Dragon product line were acquired by ScanSoft of Burlington, Massachusetts, also a Goldman Sachs client. In 2005 ScanSoft launched a de facto acquisition of Nuance Communications, and rebranded itself as Nuance.^[12]

As of 2012 LG Smart TVs include voice recognition feature powered by the same speech engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.^[13]

Versions[edit]

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).

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^Sarnataro, Valerie (2012-11-08). 'Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS) 12 Review'. technologyguide.com. Technology Guide. Retrieved 2013-07-25.
2. ^'Nuance Announces Major New Releases of Dragon for Windows and Mac OS X'. Retrieved 2016-08-22.
3. ^'Nuance product support for Microsoft Windows Vista'. Archived from the original on 2009-12-15. Retrieved 2009-12-15.
4. ^'Nuance product support for Microsoft Windows 7'. 2010. Retrieved 16 Aug 2010.
5. ^'Nuance Announces Major New Releases of Dragon for Windows and Mac OS X'. 2016. Retrieved 2016-08-22.
6. ^Baker, James K. (1975). 'The DRAGON System - An Overview'. IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. 23 (1): 24–29. doi:10.1109/TASSP.1975.1162650.
7. ^'History of Speech Recognition and Transcription Software'. Retrieved 2013-07-12.
8. ^'DragonDictate product information'. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
9. ^'Dragon NaturallySpeaking 1.0 released'. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
10. ^'Dragon Systems purchased by Lernout & Hauspie'. New York Times. 2001-05-07. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
11. ^'Goldman Is Cleared Over a Sale Gone Awry'. New York Times. 2013-01-23. Retrieved 2013-01-23.
12. ^'ScanSoft and Nuance to Merge'. 2005-05-09. Archived from the original on 2010-05-28. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
13. ^'Samsung and LG smart TVs share your voice data behind the fine print'. ConsumerReports. 2015-02-09. Retrieved 2016-06-10.

External links[edit]

• Official website for Nuance Communications

1936 AT&T's Bell Labs produced the first electronic speech synthesizer called the Voder (Dudley, Riesz and Watkins). This machine was demonstrated in the 1939 World Fairs by experts that used a keyboard and foot pedals to play the machine and emit speech.

1969 John Pierce of Bell Labs said automatic speech & voice recognition will not be a reality for several decades because it requires artificial intelligence.

Early 1970's The Hidden Markov Modeling (HMM) approach to speech & voice recognition was invented by Lenny Baum of Princeton University and shared with several ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) contractors including IBM. HMM is a complex mathematical pattern-matching strategy that eventually was adopted by all the leading speech& voice recognition companies including Dragon Systems, IBM, Philips, AT&T and others.

1971 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) established the Speech Understanding Research (SUR) program to develop a computer system that could understand continuous speech. Lawrence Roberts, who initiated the program, spent $3 million per year of government funds for 5 years. Major SUR project groups were established at CMU, SRI, MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Systems Development Corporation (SDC), and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN). It was the largest speech recognition project ever.

1978 The popular toy 'Speak and Spell' by Texas Instruments was introduced. Speak and Spell used a speech chip which led to huge strides in development of more human-like digital synthesis sound.

1982 Covox founded. Company brought digital sound (via The Voice Master, Sound Master and The Speech Thing) to the Commodore 64, Atari 400/800, and finally to the IBM PC in the mid ‘80s.

1982 Dragon Systems was founded by speech industry pioneers Drs. Jim and Janet Baker. Dragon Systems is well known for its long history of speech and language technology innovations and its large patent portfolio.

1984 SpeechWorks, the leading provider of over-the-telephone automated speech recognition (ASR) solutions, was founded.

1993 Covox sells its products out to Creative Labs, Inc.

1995 Dragon released discrete word dictation-level speech recognition software. It was the first time dictation speech & voice recognition technology was available to consumers. IBM and Kurzweil followed a few months later.

1996 Charles Schwab is the first company to devote resources towards developing up a speech recognition IVR system with Nuance. The program, Voice Broker, allows for up to 360 simultaneous customers to call in and get quotes on stock and options... it handles up to 50,000 requests each day. The system was found to be 95% accurate and set the stage for other companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Co., and United Parcel Service of America Inc., and E*Trade Securities to follow in their footsteps.

Dragon Medical Voice Recognition Software

1996 BellSouth launches the world's first voice portal, called Val and later Info By Voice.

1997 Dragon introduced 'Naturally Speaking', the first 'continuous speech' dictation software available (meaning you no longer need to pause between words for the computer to understand what you're saying).

1998 Lernout & Hauspie bought Kurzweil. Microsoft invested $45 million in Lernout & Hauspie to form a partnership that will eventually allow Microsoft to use their speech & voice recognition technology in their systems.

1999 Microsoft acquired Entropic, giving Microsoft access to what was known as the 'most accurate speech & voice recognition system' in the world.

2000 Lernout & Hauspie acquired Dragon Systems for approximately $460 million.

2000 TellMe introduces first world-wide voice portal.

2000 NetBytel launched the world's first voice enabler, which includes an on-line ordering application with real-time Internet integration for Office Depot.

Voice Recognition System

2001 ScanSoft closes acquisition of Lernout & Hauspie Speech and Language Assets.

2003 ScanSoft Ships Dragon NaturallySpeaking 7 Medical, Lowers Healthcare Costs through Highly Accurate Speech Recognition.

2003 ScanSoft closes acquisition of SpeechWorks International, Inc. anmd makes a deal to distribute and support IBM ViaVoice Desktop Products.

Dragon Voice Software

2005 ScanSoft becomes Nuance, Inc.

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