Nuance Communications Updates Dragon Suite

Nuance Communications announced a suite of Dragon professional productivity solutions for PC and Mac that leverages deep learning technology to offer enhanced levels of documentation productivity for professionals.

The releases include Dragon Professional Individual version 15, Legal Individual version 15 and Professional Individual for Mac version 6, all featuring dictation, transcription and customization capabilities.

The solutions also sync vocabulary customizations and auto-texts with Dragon Anywhere to extend the benefits of speech recognition to mobile devices running iOS or Android.

“We want all of our PC customers, regardless of platform, to have the leading edge in speech recognition capabilities available to them at the same time,” Rick Brown, senior director of product management for Nuance Communications, told eWEEK. “Both Mac and Windows users now have the advantages of deep learning technology to drive even greater accuracy and ease of use when using speech recognition for their documentation use cases.”

This latest Dragon release deploys deep learning capabilities that can run embedded on a personal computer, leveraging users’ own speech data to improve their language and acoustic model.

“Dragon is unique in that it allows customers to use voice as much as they want to increase their productivity. A customer can use Dragon simply to dictate or document or they can command and control their entire PC by voice,” Brown said. “Dragon provides an intuitive UI plus helpful hints and training that enables them to use Dragon to its full capabilities, depending on their needs. We have also streamlined how customers set up and use external microphones and significantly reduced the number of steps required to accomplish common tasks, such as transcription.”

Dragon Professional Individual is slated to be available for download in English in the United States, the U.K. and Australia for $300 in September, with physical product shipments available by mid-September.

Professional Individual is available for $150 for users upgrading from Professional Individual version 14 and Professional versions 12 and higher, and for $200 for users upgrading from Dragon Premium versions 12 and higher.

“Deep learning is already driving increased intelligence and automation across a variety of markets,” said Vlad Sejnoha, chief technology officer for Nuance. “For instance, we apply deep learning to our core voice technologies integrated within virtual agents in call centers for customer care, and within automotive assistant capabilities for connected cars.”

Specifically for Dragon, he noted, deep learning drives greater accuracy for each and every user by enabling substantially more powerful speaker independent models which are then further optimized during use to individual voices, dialects and writing styles, to an extent that has not been possible before.

“As a result, this allows users to quickly and easily complete documentation tasks and create and capture content with minimal editing,” he said.