Dragon NaturallySpeaking 13 Home is the world’s best selling speech recognition software that lets you use your voice to get more done every day on your computer — quickly and accurately — at home, school or for hobbies. You simply talk and text appears on the screen up to three time faster than typing. 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.

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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 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.

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

Dragon Dictation makes it possible to transform voice to text and put your thoughts down anywhere anytime. All you need is the app installed on Windows, Mac, iPhone or Android phone and your voice. Let’s have a look what Dragon software you’d better choose and how to correctly use Dragon Dictation app for smartphones.

SEE ALSO: How to Turn Audio into Text Free with VoiceBase
SEE ALSO: How to Convert Audio Files

How to Dragon Dictate on iPhone and Android

On the official Nuance Communications site you will find apps for home users, journalists and bloggers as well as apps for business users, drivers and medical workers. The one we observed is Dragon Dictation. It’s great for every day using. You can download Dragon Dictation app for iPhone or Android absolutely free or charge.

1. Open the Dragon Dictation app.
2. Set the Region you are in. It is required to precise the language of recognition.
   
3. Choose the Tap and Dictate button and begin to dictate.
   
4. When you are through, tap the Stop button. You will see a written text of your message. You can correct it using the keyboard.
5. Now you can copy the text to carry it over to any other app.
   

At the same time you may publish the dictated text on Twitter, send a message or an email with it.

If you want to change the language, go to Settings and choose the right one there. You can set other features like name recognition here.

Now, let’s run a test and check what this app can actually do.

Dragon Dictation Test

To make sure that Dragon app is as brilliant as it sounds, we dictated 5 text pieces to check the quality of recognition.

1. The first one was a short phrase from a famous Lullaby:

Twinkle, twinkle, Little Star.

Free Speech To Text Software

Great result, but that was easy.

2. The second one was a long and sophisticated tongue twister:

Whether the weather is right, or whether the weather is not

Whether the weather is warm, or whether the weather is hot,

We’ll weather the weather, whatever the weather,

Whether we like it or not

As you can see, the written variant is not 100% correct.

3. The third piece is the description of Freemake Blog. We didn’t train these phrases so they looked natural with pauses and different intonation.

Dragon Voice To Text Program

Freemake Blog is the place where we, Freemake team, share our findings of new and interesting apps, software and websites across the Web. Here you’ll learn about latest tech trends, visit hot destinations on the Net, get acquainted with web influencers and laugh at our funny discoveries. Feel free to contact Freemake Blog team.

Unfortunately, the app fails here.

4. The fourth one is said in Scottish English:

Dinnae fuss, Gonninae dae that!

Which means “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do that”. And it was a complete fail. So as it is impossible in the general mode, for dialects recognition create a profile and modify Accent.

Well, if you live in Scotland, try to speak general English when you use Dragon Dictation app.

5. And the last one is a French phrase we decided to try a different language.

“J’ai le mal de la Seine” – I adore river the Seine.

This time the app showed a nice result again.

Dragon Tips and Tricks for Advanced Users

Using Dragon app for a long time but your text leaves much to be desired? Try these tips and tricks to improve the quality of your speech recognition:

• Don’t dictate if the background is noisy.
• Position the microphone near your mouth.
• Try to use the same volume, pace and tone every time you dictate.
• If you want to use punctuation, say the items’ names like comma or full stop.

While dictating, you are welcome to use the following voice commands:

Give me help, Set for Arial (or any other font), Bold that, Delete previous character/5 words, Spell, Select “Twinkle” (or any other word), New line/paragraph, Undo that, etc.

To see the complete list of commands, ask the Dragon app: “What can I say?”.

The Good:

• Dragon App is free for smartphones where you most need it.
• It is really fast at typing your words.
• Your text can be easily shared on social networks.
• Can be used on the go.
• The interface is stylish and user-friendly, so you don’t need to be a software pro to use it.
• The app is very useful for students as they can easily epitomize their lectures.
• It is as well helpful for language learning as you can obtain a right pronunciation using it.

The Bad:

• No note storage.
• You need a reliable Internet connection for dictating.
• If you use 3G or 4G, it might lead to expensive network charges.
• There is no button to erase all the dictated text so you have to delete it with the keyboard, which is not so convenient.
• The result isn’t always precise.
• The proper pronouns are mostly not correct.

Best Speech To Text Software

Verdict:

As you see the Dragon Dictation App is the most suitable for short and prepared phrases. Nonetheless, it is a great app to write your ideas down hands-free.

Dragon Desktop Options

Apart from numerous iPhone and Android apps, Nuance Communications also develop software for computers. Dragon Software in its turn is not free. There are four options for Windows users:

• Dragon Home for $74.99 is great for bloggers and students for dictating lectures, blog posts and varies to-do’s.
• Dragon Premium for $174.99 has more options than Dragon Home. For example, it lets you dictate via Bluetooth set. Dragon Premium is perfect for capturing documents, surf the Net, send emails, etc.
• Dragon Professional Individual for $300 gives powerful customization features and is a must-have for working with business documents.
• Dragon legal Individual for $500 includes a specialized legal vocabulary and lets you work with contracts, briefs and other docs just by using your voice.

Those who prefer to use Mac can benefit from two options:

• Dragon for Mac for $300 that is fully customizable and can work with presentations, emails, spreadsheets and, of course, documents.
• Dragon for Mac medical starting form $999 lets capture or improve clinical documentation fast and easily.

Check how it works on Mac:

Dragon Dictation’s working principles are similar to those of Siri, Google or Cortana, it recognizes speech and then converts it into words. It is really easy to use and can amaze you with a quick and precise result.

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