History
Dr. James Baker and Dr. Janet Baker founded Dragon Systems in 1982 to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype; he was President of the company and she was CEO. DragonDictate was first released for DOS, and utilized hidden Markov models, which is a statistical method for the recognition of speech. At the time, the hardware was insufficiently powerful 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 pronounce one word at a time, each clearly separated by a small pause. 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. The company was then purchased in June 2000 by Lernout & Hauspie, a corporation that had been involved in financial scandals as reported by the New York Times. After the all-share deal advised by Goldman Sachs, Lernout & Hauspie declared bankruptcy in November 2000, leaving the Bakers with nothing but a lawsuit against Goldman Sachs, which may go to trial in Boston in November 2012. Following the bankruptcy of Lernout & Hauspie, the rights to the Dragon product line were acquired by ScanSoft. In 2005, ScanSoft launched a de facto acquisition of Nuance Communications, and rebranded itself as Nuance.
Read more about this topic: Dragon Naturally Speaking
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)