Dragon Naturally Speaking by Nuance is the dominant player in speech recognition with market share in the US of between 65 percent and 70 percent. Many competitors have dropped out or been bought up, cementing Nuance’s position (Nuance purchased IBM’s ViaVoice in 2003 and Philips’ SpeechMagic in 2008).
There appears to be a growing awareness by the major dictation companies of Nuance’s importance to the future of dictation, especially in the medical and legal fields. Both SpeechExec Pro (Philips) and DSS Player Pro (Olympus) have a Dragon icon on their menu bar allowing dictations to be converted to text (should Dragon software be installed).
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Sony, Philips and Olympus have also bundled a cut-down version of the Dragon NS software with one of their digital notetakers. These bundles are useful if you don’t have admin support at your disposal and are proving to be popular with sole-traders and sales reps. The 0667 with Dragon is Philips' entry into the field.
How it works: dictate into the recorder (a Philips Digital Voice Tracer 662) then connect it to the PC. The Dragon software will pick up the files and transcribe your speech into Microsoft Word right in front of you.
There appears to be a growing awareness by the major dictation companies of Nuance’s importance to the future of dictation, especially in the medical and legal fields. Both SpeechExec Pro (Philips) and DSS Player Pro (Olympus) have a Dragon icon on their menu bar allowing dictations to be converted to text (should Dragon software be installed).
Sony, Philips and Olympus have also bundled a cut-down version of the Dragon NS software with one of their digital notetakers. These bundles are useful if you don’t have admin support at your disposal and are proving to be popular with sole-traders and sales reps. The 0667 with Dragon is Philips' entry into the field.
How it works: dictate into the recorder (a Philips Digital Voice Tracer 662) then connect it to the PC. The Dragon software will pick up the files and transcribe your speech into Microsoft Word right in front of you.
Other, more expensive Dragon products are able to transcribe live speech: users typically have a microphone or headset into which they speak with the text appearing in whatever application is open. This software can literally control the whole PC making the keyboard redundant. Dragon uses the claim ‘up to 99% accuracy’ on its packaging which may be technically possible but seems a touch optimistic for the average user. With some determined training 95% accuracy seems to be my limit.
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