As graduate students at Rockefeller University in 1970, they became interested in speech recognition while observing waveforms of speech on an oscilloscope. now owns and manufactures this product, Dragon Naturally Speaking.ĭragon Systems was founded in 1982 by James and Janet Baker to commercialize speech recognition technology. Along with (or bundled with) this introduction of sound to computers came an early form of speech recognition.Īnother company that was founded in 1982 and whose eventual product has become the overwhelming leader in the speech recognition market was Dragon Systems.
Covox 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. The first company to launch a commercial product was Covox in 1982.
Please view the Speech Recognition Timeline to get a full view of its development. Like most emerging technologies, there were several competing research "camps", each working independently to develop speech recognition. It was not until the early 1980's when the technology reached the commercial market. Government (primarily by the Military and DARPA - Defense Advanced Research Project Agency). At that time, most research was funded and performed by Universities and the U.S. With the average CPU now above a Pentium III and RAM levels at 500 MB and up, accuracy levels have reached 95% and better with transcription speeds at over 160 words per minute.Īs mentioned above, the study of automatic speech recognition and transcription began in the 1936 with AT&T's Bell Labs. Ever since research of this technology began in 1936, the largest barriers to the speed and accuracy of speech & voice recognition were computer speed and power (or the lack thereof). The technology of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Transcription has progressed greatly over the past few years.
Among the earliest applications for speech & voice recognition were automated telephone systems and medical dictation software (for transcription). Speech and voice recognition enables “hands-free” control of various electronic devices-a particular boon to many disabled persons-and the automatic creation of “print-ready” dictation. Speech and vocie recognition refers to the ability of machines to respond to spoken commands. Please also view the Speech Recognition Timeline. Voice activation is helpful if you need to give a speech to a class full of students, since they won't be able to get the full idea unless you say so explicitly during the demonstration video.History of Speech & Voice Recognition and Transcription Software With the recording, you can be sure that every speaker who hears your speech will understand and remember what you are trying to say. dictation recording is extremely helpful if you are giving a presentation at a school or university. There are ways around this however, by using a microphone and speaking through it (there is a demonstration video included with the program that demonstrates this).Īnother big difference between Dragon NaturallySpeaking and other voice recognition programs is that it comes with three bonus features: dictation recording, voice activation, and goldman sachs. This has its own benefits and drawbacks, the biggest of which is that you can never be exactly like the voice that was inserted into the software, which means that your accent may vary from what you actually speak. Nuance on the other hand requires you to first insert a clip of your own voice into the program in order to have it recognize your voice. With Dragon, you just have to speak the sentence that is being translated, and it will automatically recognizes your voice and play back the appropriate accent.
The biggest difference between Dragon Naturally Speaking and Nuance lies in the voice recognition.
Dragon automatically adjusts its settings to match your current environment so that there is no need to tweak anything to make it work with your Windows environment. It is very similar to Nuance, but since both programs are designed for Windows, the compatibility should be almost 100%. Unlike speech to text translators, Dragon automatically recognizes the meaning of the words while reading them, thus eliminating the need for you to do so yourself. Dragon Naturally Speaking is a new dictation software that works by reading text out loud for you.