The deal was not originally supposed to be all stock and the unavailability of the Goldman Sachs team to advise concerning the change in terms was one of the grounds of the Bakers' subsequent lawsuit. Following the all-share deal advised by Goldman Sachs, Lernout & Hauspie declared bankruptcy in November 2000. The company was then purchased in June 2000 by Lernout & Hauspie, a Belgium-based corporation that was subsequently found to have been perpetrating financial fraud. Gould also designed the tutorials in both DragonDictate for DOS version 2.0 and Dragon Talk. Gould was the principal architect and lead engineer for the development of Dragon NaturallyOrganized (1.0), Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organizer (3.52), Dragon NaturallySpeaking (1.0 through 2.02), and DragonDictate for Windows (1.0). Joel Gould was the director of emerging technologies at Dragon Systems. ĭragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997. DragonDictate was based on a trigram model, and is known as a discrete utterance speech recognition engine. Users were forced to enunciate one word at a time, clearly separated by a small pause after each word. At the time, the hardware was not powerful enough to address the problem of word segmentation, and DragonDictate was unable to determine the boundaries of words during continuous speech input. He was President of the company and she was CEO.ĭragonDictate was first released for DOS, and utilized hidden Markov models, a probabilistic method for temporal pattern recognition. Baker, his wife, founded Dragon Systems to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype.

James Baker laid out the description of a speech understanding system called DRAGON in 1975. The Professional version allows creation of custom commands to control programs or functions not built into NaturallySpeaking.ĭr. Voice profiles can be accessed by different computers in a networked environment, although the audio hardware and configuration must be identical to those of the machine generating the configuration. (Dragon does not support dictating to background windows.) The software has three primary areas of functionality: voice recognition in dictation with speech transcribed as written text, recognition of spoken commands, and text-to-speech: speaking text content of a document. As an example, dictated words appear in a floating tooltip as they are spoken (though there is an option to suppress this display to increase speed), and when the speaker pauses, the program transcribes the words into the active window at the location of the cursor. Dragon NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal user interface.

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