Nuance taps into deep learning to improve Dragon speech recognition by 24 percent

With the trends in personal computing favoring software that gets to know its users, the newest version of Nuance's Dragon voice dictation suite of software--Dragon 15, announced Tuesday--is right on track. Dragon 15--including Dragon Professional Individual ( 300), Dragon Professional Individual for Mac ( 300), Dragon Legal ( 500), and Nuance Dragon Anywhere (free to install; subscriptions run 15/month or 150/year)--is based on Nuance's new machine-learning technology. The company claims that this technology has improved recognition accuracy by at least 24 percent, thanks to its algorithm that learns your distinctive speech patterns over time combined with an improved capability to pick out speech from a noisy room. Lawyers may buy the expanded Legal version, which is trained using a legal vocabulary of more than 400 million words, according to the company. But the majority of Nuance's customers will probably invest in the Dragon Professional Individual version, which is designed for a more general vocabulary.