Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS) 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 Windows personal computers.Version 15 (Professional Individual and Legal Individual), which supports 32-bit and 64-bit.
Earlier today, Microsoft announced its plans to purchase Nuance for $56 per share—23 percent above Nuance's closing price last Friday. The deal adds up to a $16 billion cash outlay and a total valuation for Nuance of about $19.7 billion, including that company's assumed debt.
Dragon Professional Group. Designed for shared access. All the benefits of Dragon voice recognition software designed for deployment across the business. Share custom words, standard texts and pro-forma documents for faster productivity, leverage Nuance Management Centre for optimal use of licenses. Since teaming up with Tomek Obirek, DragonVeterinary has formed partnerships with Nuance Communications (and a number of distributors) to sell their veterinarian vocabulary alongside Dragon Medical Practice Edition, the world leading medical dictation software.
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. Control your computer by voice with speed and accuracy. Dragon speech recognition software is better than ever. Talk and your words appear on the screen. Say commands and your computer obeys. Dragon is 3x faster than typing and it's 99% accurate. Master Dragon right out of the box, and start experiencing big productivity gains immediately.
Nuance is a well-known player in the field of natural language recognition. The company's technology is the core of Apple's Siri personal assistant. Nuance also sells well-known personal speech-recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is invaluable to many people with a wide range of physical disabilities.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking, originally released in 1997, was one of the first commercially available continuous dictation products—meaning software that did not require the user to pause briefly between words. In 2000, Dragon Systems was acquired by ScanSoft, which acquired Nuance Communications in 2005 and rebranded itself as Nuance.
Earlier versions of Dragon software used hidden Markov models to puzzle out the meaning of human speech, but this method had serious limitations compared to modern AI algorithms. In 2009, Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li created ImageNet—a massive training data set that spawned a boom in deep-learning algorithms used for modern, core AI tech.
AdvertisementAfter Microsoft researchers Dong Yu and Frank Seide successfully applied deep-learning techniques to real-time automatic speech recognition in 2010, Dragon—now Nuance—applied the same techniques to its own speech-recognition software.
Fast forward to today, and according to both Microsoft and Nuance, medically targeted versions of Dragon are in use by 77 percent of hospitals, 75 percent of radiologists, and 55 percent of physicians in the United States.
Microsoft and Nuance began a partnership in 2019 to deliver ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) technologies to health care providers. ACI technology is intended to reduce physician burnout and increase efficiency by offloading administrative tasks onto computers. (A 2017 study published in the Annals of Family Medicine documented physicians typically spending two hours of record-keeping for every single hour of actual patient care.)
Acquiring Nuance gives Microsoft direct access to the company's entire health care customer list. It also gives Microsoft the opportunity to push Nuance technology—currently, mostly used in the US—to Microsoft's own large international market. Nuance chief executive Mark Benjamin—who will continue to run Nuance as a Microsoft division after the acquisition—describes it as an opportunity to 'superscale how we change an industry.'
The move doubles Microsoft's total addressable market in the health care vertical to nearly $500 billion. It also marries what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes as 'the AI layer at the healthcare point of delivery' with Microsoft's own massive cloud infrastructure, including Azure, Teams, and Dynamics 365.
The acquisition has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Nuance and Microsoft and it is expected to close by the end of 2021.
Dragon for Windows | Dragon | Dragon | Dragon |
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Up to 99% speech recognition accuracy right out of the box | |||
Create, format and edit documents just by speaking | |||
Create email and search the Web faster than ever using simple voice commands | |||
Built on 'Deep Learning' speech engine that continuously adjusts to your voice | |||
Listen back to dictated text | |||
Optimised for touchscreen devices | |||
Create and edit your spreadsheets with full text control in Microsoft Excel | |||
Create custom voice commands for standard texts | |||
Import/export custom word lists for your sector | |||
Turn recordings into editable text | |||
Automatically transcribe your recordings | |||
Sync customizations with the Dragon Anywhere mobile app | |||
Combine with the Nuance PowerMic for ease-of-use | |||
Network managed licenses and volume discounts | |||
Integrated legal terms specifically for legal professionals |