Dragon steps up battle for corporate market

By Adam Gifford

Leading speech recognition software leader Dragon Systems aims to push into the corporate market with its Dragon Naturally Speaking products.

International channel marketing manager Ellen Doran said the Newton, Massachusetts-based company already enjoyed strong support in the legal and medical markets, but the corporate world had been slower to adopt speech recognition technology.

"We want to show Dragon can increase productivity with real solutions," she said. "You can replace everything which is done with a mouse or keypad as an input device with speech recognition."

Dragon is working with VARs (value add resellers) like New Zealand distributor Orator Technologies to devise specific packages for industry groups or specific customers.

Orator marketing director Fiona Mount said much of that work involved writing specific macros so commands for common routines which can take a number of keystrokes or mouse could be reduced to a single command.

"If every Monday you start the week by calling up a specific report, you can program the system to call it up by saying 'get Monday's report'," she said.

While an introductory $425 version of Dragon was available, Orator was pushing the $1695 professional version which allowed macro authoring.

Ellen Doran said the stripped-down version was often bought by executives to use at home and learning what the software could do before introducing it to their workplace.

"People are not aware what speech can do. When we have displays, we still get people whose mouths drop when they see you can dictate into a computer. They're not aware this technology existed."

Dragon, a private company, was formed in 1982 to develop voice technology, but did not release a product until Dragon for DOS in 1982. A Windows version followed two years later, and Dragon Naturally Speaking was launched in 1997, freeing people from having to speak slowly with a space after each word.

Ellen Doran said a large amount of work had gone into gathering data on speech patterns in different regions, with the aim of cutting down the amount of time a user needed to train the software. Old documents written by the user could also be run through the program, to teach the software writing styles and what words to use.

"It's all about increasing accuracy, which is the key," she said.

Last month Dragon released Dragon Naturally Speaking Mobile Organizer, which allows it to be used with contact management and messaging programs like Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes and Palm Pilot organising software.

People can speak into a hand-held digital recorder to create e-mails and diary entries. For example, he or she may say "send an e-mail" or "schedule an appointment". The recorder stores the information until the user's computer is available.

When the user connects the recorder to the PC and the system transcribes and analyses what was said, it organises the dictation into action categories.

Ellen Doran said Dragon was researching how it could make its software work on small mobile devices. Currently it needs a PC with a reasonably fast processor and 128 Mb of memory to run comfortably.

"Our technology is ahead of the hardware."