“Having used Dragon NaturallySpeaking for the last few versions, I can’t wait to try new Dragon Naturally Speaking 10! Even more accurate, faster, and with new shortcuts. Sign me up!” – Joel “I’ve used Dragon in the past, and now that I have switched to a Mac I was happy to see that there is a Dragon product for the Mac too. Dragon speech recognition Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 comparison by product Feature matrix Feature Description Legal Professional Premium Home Recognition accuracy Turns your voice into text with up to 99% accuracy New - Up to a 15% improvement to out-of-the-box accuracy compared to Dragon version 12. Recognition speed.
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Now in its 17th year and its 13th release, Dragon NaturallySpeaking remains the benchmark for Windows-based speech-to-text technology. At this point in the game, anyone who wants to use speech recognition software is probably already using it. Nonetheless, Dragon is hoping to entice new users to the product by adding new features and cutting the price of last year’s $200 release. But will a $100 price tag and an incremental improvement in quality finally make you talk the talk?
As its key enhancement, Dragon says this release of the software is 15 percent more accurate than Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12. The app also now supports the built-in microphones installed on most laptops instead of just external mics, and you can dictate directly to major web browsers—Internet Explorer 9 and up, Chrome, or Firefox—so you can finally speak your Tweets, Facebook status, and blog posts instead of having to type them. Otherwise, you can dictate into just about any text-centric app, right down to Notepad.
Training NaturallySpeaking 13 takes all of a minute, and the basics are handled by a simple walkthrough. Mastering all the ins and outs of the application, though, could very well take a lifetime.
Let’s start with the accuracy claims. I tested Dragon against both Windows 7’s and Windows 8’s built-in speech recognition, using a high-end headset and the first lines of Breakfast of Champions as a guide. I found that Dragon did the clearly better job. As you can see from test results document, Dragon nearly nailed the transcription straight out of the gate. Windows, on the other hand, had trouble with a few words, including the tricky “lonesome” and some less obvious ones, like mistaking “man” for “men.” Of course, the biggest trip-up with Windows was the name “Kilgore Trout,” which it comically rendered as “co court route.” Dragon, much to my surprise, not only got “Kilgore” right, but correctly capitalized the last name of Trout without being explicitly told to do so. Overall, even allowing for cleaning up the minor errors that Dragon made, I achieved a solid 60 percent increase in overall input speed over typing.
To take the test further, I also used both Dragon and Windows with the microphone built into my laptop, to see how realistic it would be to dictate text into thin air. I didn’t have high hopes. Laptop mics are generally very low-quality and, unless you push your face right up against the machine to speak, they can be easily overcome by ambient noise. That said, Dragon’s result was surprisingly good. While it flubbed the introduction of the text, overall it did a surprisingly credible job at the transcription. On the other hand, Windows’ built-in transcription was a complete disaster, a comical throwback to the early days of the technology. The improvement alone here makes the software worth the investment.
Dragon still isn’t perfect. Making changes and revisions as you go is still convoluted and non-intuitive. Even making a simple change, like adding the hyphen to the phrase “science fiction” through the Dragon voice command interface, is a complicated nightmare. Considering this task would otherwise require pressing all of two buttons on the keyboard to complete, it’s not hard to see why some people don’t stick with speech recognition for the long haul.
But the biggest issue I have with dictation software is hardly a new one. It’s difficult to explain, but it seems that many of us have simply developed a strong link between the brain and the fingertips. While you’re typing, sentences flow out of you at a more deliberate pace, and the process of tapping out one word somehow helps push the next word forward. I’m not the first person to remark that, as a product of the computer age, typing just feels more natural to me, and that my dictated writing comes off as somewhat stilted in comparison to my unbearably nuanced and well-crafted typed prose. All the accuracy improvements in the world won’t change that. Those changes only come with time and lots of practice.
Of course, other users may find dictation freeing and may find leaving the keyboard behind is conducive to more creative thinking. If you’re the kind of computer user who doesn’t find Siri awkward and weird, well, you can probably ignore all of the above. If nothing else, Dragon gives you back plenty of time that you would have spent typing.
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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 merged with Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products and was later acquired by Nuance Communications, formerly known as ScanSoft. 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 Windows 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]
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.
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]
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From 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).
Dragon Naturally Speaking 15See also[edit]Notes[edit]References[edit]
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dragon_NaturallySpeaking&oldid=918936661'
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