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
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