Talk:Dragon NaturallySpeaking

One installation - one voice?
A friend told me that DNS "only recognizes one voice" so it is useless for transcribing interviews or such. Is this true? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus 03:36, 14 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes that is correct it will not work with interviews. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.188.244.158 (talk) 23:21, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
 * Not exactly true. You can set up multiple users on a single installation of DNS, so that, e.g., each member of a family can have their own voice and language model and be recognized appropriately without confusion, as long as they always log in to their own user profile within DNS. And DNS has for a long time had the ability to recognize from recorded speech, with correction afterward. But it will probably do quite poorly on a single recording with multiple speakers. Proper ASR with any ASR software would probably require an intermediate step of speaker identification to split the recording into single-speaker segments, not only recognizing "There is a change of speaker here", but also "The new speaker is speaker A" (who was the speaker in, e.g., segments 1, 3, 6, and 9), so that all of each speaker's segments can benefit from correction on each other. --Thnidu (talk) (Senior Linguist, Dragon Systems, 1990-2001) 18:46, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

For transcription, it only works with one voice. Each copy of program, installed on a computer, is licensed for one user. However, you can have as many user profiles as you want, so many families create one profile for dad, one for mom, and so on. When you do live dictation, you choose the correct profile. Even with off line transcription, you have to choose the correct user profile, and again, it only works with that user only. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.136.90.79 (talk) 06:45, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

History needs major expansion
The history of Dragon software, technology, products, and applications needs a major expansion. This software has a unique and valuable history. Its role in the development of speech recognition and applications should not be lost. Usually when companies write Wikipedia articles they sound like marketing materials. I hope the current owners might put that aside and see how an accurate and full history would be viewed as a major boost of reputation. Completing this task, if it can ever be fully complete, might require calling on the former stakeholders and employees, maybe even competitors. Johnswolter (talk) 20:02, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

I just added a reference to a journal article in which James Baker proposed a system called DRAGON, which I'm sure influenced the commercial product that he came out with 7 years later (though I haven't found a citation yet that explicitly points to that model as the precursor to the commercial system). Showeropera (talk) 17:26, 18 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Certainly the name was precursor. The software may also have been ancestral, but I'm not sure of that. And in any case, my memories of company literature from my ten or so years there as Senior Linguist are inadmissible as references (WP:OR). But maybe someone will dig those materials up someday.
 * But wrt User:Johnswolter's paragraph, Wikipedia doesn't allow companies to write or edit articles about themselves, I'm pretty sure. --Thnidu (talk) 05:49, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

This topic title is deeply correct. James K. Baker singlehandedly invented modern speech recognition as a doctoral student at Carnegie-Mellon University; his (then an unpatentable "method") invention received the name "hierarchical Markov model". Baker did not just write a paper, as this article now says--he designed and built an entire prototype system at CMU. It was his Ph.D. dissertation project. He named it the "Dragon System", and, when tested alongside several other systems built over five years by multiple contractors with $50 million of (D)ARPA money, Baker's Dragon System beat all of them! This all was documented fairly at some length by noted MIT professor Dennis Klatt in a paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) in about 1976-78. Klatt's report covered the "ARPA Speech Understanding Research Project", "ARPA SUR" for short, which ran in parallel (1971-1976) with the much more famous ARPA project that gave us the ARPANET, which became the Internet.

After he received his Ph.D., Baker went with his wife, Janet (also a speech recognition person) to IBM, which had been following ARPA SUR development closely. They were not there long but IBM learned Baker's technology. The Bakers then went back to the Boston area and started their "Dragon Systems" company on the proverbial kitchen table. Versions of their company website before the Lernout & Hauspie disaster told the story of their early company days and growth. There was also a writeup in a business journal, possibly "INC." The entire story of the Bakers deserves a book-length treatment or even a movie. I met them during the ARPA SUR years when they visited the company for which I then worked but have not spoken to either of them since then. They are decent, good folks.LM6407 (talk) 06:35, 18 June 2015 (UTC)
 * All true. Thank you, . --Thnidu (talk) (Senior Linguist, Dragon Systems, 1990-2001) 04:27, 20 August 2015 (UTC)

Move?

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: no consensus. --  tariq abjotu  04:54, 12 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Dragon NaturallySpeaking → Dragon Naturally Speaking – proper spacing - many sources --Relisted. --  tariq abjotu  05:33, 31 July 2013 (UTC)  - down  load  ׀  talk  05:58, 23 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose, the name of the product is "NaturallySpeaking" — we can't arbitrarily add a space there, that'd be like changing Toys "R" Us to Toys Are Us--Xiaphias (talk) 03:12, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose, the trademarked name is (CamelHumped) NaturallySpeaking. And, BTW, Toys-R-Us uses a backwards R. Checkingfax (talk) 03:21, 25 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Oppose. The product itself has an official typography which we can respect because it is not too strange, just camel-capped, which is allowed in many cases by Manual of Style/Trademarks, and is in the remaining cases not changed to a space between the two parts, but is instead changed to all lower case after the first capital, such that Dragon NaturallySpeaking would become Dragon Naturallyspeaking. Binksternet (talk) 04:34, 25 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Support – In books, the more English-like version with the space has become more common. Per MOS:TM, then we should use that.  Dicklyon (talk) 03:17, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Oppose, Nuance uses NaturallySpeaking. Rjwilmsi  07:13, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
 * So you haven't actually looked at what the guideline MOS:TM suggests? Or you're suggesting we ignore it, for what reason? Dicklyon (talk) 14:04, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Looked at it, it says CamelCase is a judgement call. In my judgement, from the sources I have seen relating to Dragon, the CamelCase form is in general use. Rjwilmsi  15:30, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
 * That's a more sensible argument than "Nuance uses NaturallySpeaking". But the spaced version is in even wider use, and is more English like, so why that judgement call?  Dicklyon (talk) 15:37, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
 * See CamelCase Checkingfax (talk) 19:31, 30 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Support per Dicklyon. If the proposed form is more common in sources now, there's no good reason to prefer the official name. --BDD (talk) 16:53, 30 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

linkspam
The latest revision was the addition of a link
 * http://dragonvoicesoftware.com  Dragon Voice Software

under "References". If it had any business being on the page, it should be under External Links. But in fact a whois search reveals that this domain is not owned by the manufacturer, Nuance Communications, but by a private individual, most likely a retailer. So I took it out. --Thnidu (talk) 22:59, 20 June 2014 (UTC)

I removed a "See also" that was a promotional entry with only an external link. This was it: We have no article for BigHand. --Thnidu (talk) 05:01, 11 January 2018 (UTC)
 * BigHand is a Server-side Speech Recognition Software tool:  Driven by Dragon NaturallySpeaking™ technology and integrated with our workflow tools. It allows recorded files to be instantly transcribed. It also comes loaded with additional features.

64-bit or 32 bit
I think it should be mentioned in the article that NaturallySpeaking is still (as of version 13) a native 32-bit application with code added to make it run on 64-bit systems. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:6:2180:D0:3C7C:EEED:EDF0:4EF8 (talk) 11:08, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately, since you posted this note anonymously (IP address), I don't think you'll get this message: Be bold! Find a good reference and add it yourself! --Thnidu (talk) 03:49, 24 March 2015 (UTC)

Edit request: Microsoft acquisition
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is produced by Nuance, which has been acquired by Microsoft. I'm a Microsoft employee, so I'm not going to make the change myself, but I propose the following two changes:

Replace the lede paragraph with the following:

Add the following paragraph to the bottom of the History section (which I don't think is a great history section, but which I at least don't think I'm making worse...):

—me_and 13:05, 7 March 2022 (UTC)


 * reviewing Happy Editing-- IAm Chaos  04:29, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
 * ✅ I did modify your second paragraph to match the format of the rest of the history section. I don't particularly mind either way though so if you want to do a copyedit on that paragraph, I'll give you the {ECOI|g}} template message. Happy Editing-- IAm Chaos  04:36, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
 * a dablink in the citation - noting here for clarity after DPL bot reached out to me. Happy Editing-- IAm Chaos  06:11, 8 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you! I thought I'd checked for DAB links, but clearly missed one... —me_and 22:11, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
 * No problem, I missed it too; I always forget about links in < ref> tags anyway. Happy Editing-- IAm Chaos  22:12, 9 March 2022 (UTC)