Dragon NaturallySpeaking™ Enterprise Product Family Expands Speech Recognition to Networked Environments
New System Simplifies Use and Management of Speech Recognition Software for Corporations, Non-Profits, and Government
NEWTON, Mass. - April 27, 1999 - Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise, the first family of large vocabulary continuous speech recognition products built for networked environments, was announced today by Dragon Systems®, Inc. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise is part of Dragon Systems' overall strategy to better serve the needs of larger organizations by offering convenient access to speech recognition technology.
Easy-to-use and highly accurate speech recognition software can improve productivity and speed in a variety of applications, including email packages, forms entry and natural language search programs, medical and legal record systems, and corporate groupware applications.
The new Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise software allows network administrators to install and manage Dragon NaturallySpeaking software from a central location. Network administrators can use the new Administrator Workbench to create and delete users, update vocabularies and speech commands. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise operates on any network that provides directory service to Windows®, including Windows NT® and Novell® NetWare®.
Speech files and speech commands are stored on the central server. Users can log in from any PC on the network and use their speech files and speech commands. When users save changes to their speech files, those updated files are available the next time he or she logs in from any PC on the network. Back-ups can be performed using existing back-up software. Portable PC users can copy their speech files to their local drive, alter them while disconnected from the network, and then re-synchronize when reconnected to the network.
The Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise product family features four solutions designed to meet the needs of different marketplaces and applications. The systems include Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise (based on the popular Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred product), Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise Professional, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise Medical and Legal.
All Enterprise editions contain the ability to run macros, or speech commands created by MIS departments or Value Added Resellers. With these commands, Dragon NaturallySpeaking can be customized to work with corporate applications. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise Professional contains all of the features of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise plus the ability to create speech commands. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal Enterprise and Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical Enterprise contain advanced vocabularies for legal and medical professionals.
"Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise editions are designed to meet the needs of corporations, government offices, non-profits, small offices, and more where individuals need to use multiple PCs within an organization," said Dragon Systems Vice President of North American Marketing Roger Matus. "Network management is an important request from our customers. But, it is also important to let users access their speech files from any PC on the network. For example, a doctor could go from examining room to examining room and dictate notes on different PCs. Inspectors in a factory can log records from different PCs on the floor. Police officers can complete reports from any available desk. Professionals with a desktop and a laptop PC can access their files from both of them.
Organizations can take advantage of the Dragon Systems Volume Licensing Program announced today to receive discounts on purchases. These groups may also standardize their sound systems across multiple computer brands by choosing a Universal Serial Bus (USB) solution (see today's related announcement, "Dragon Systems Releases USB Solutions Designed to Significantly Enhance Speech Recognition Accuracy") with their purchase.
BENEFITS AND FEATURES:
USE SPEECH RECOGNITION ON ANY PC ON THE NETWORK - Users can harness the power of speech recognition technology to create documents, notes, and correspondence from any authorized PC on the network. They simply log-in and their trained speech files are then available for use.
WORKS IN VIRTUALLY ANY WINDOWS® APPLICATION - Users just point their mouse and click in any application. Their text automatically appears in the text window where the cursor is. The product supports Microsoft Word®, Corel WordPerfect®, Lotus Notes®, WordPro®, e-mail packages, Internet chat packages and many more.
CONTROL WINDOWS DESKTOP BY VOICE - Users can open Windows applications from the start menu, navigate menu items in Microsoft Office 97, and switch between Windows applications by voice.
SELECT-AND-SAY™ FUNCTIONALITY - Select-and-Say enables users to select words or phrases that they wish to edit simply by saying "Select" <the word or phrase> and then saying the new word or phrase. This capability exists in Dragon NaturallySpeaking and several third party applications, including Microsoft Word® 97, Corel® WordPerfect® 8, GoldMine, Microsoft WordPad, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft Chat 2.0 and 2.5.
NATURAL LANGUAGE COMMANDS - Easy to use and easy to remember commands can be issued in a natural way to edit and format text within Microsoft Word 97. For example, a user can say "Make a five by two table," or many other variations.
DRAGON NATURALLYMOBILE™ SOFTWARE - Users can create documents by speaking into a portable recording device, such as the Dragon NaturallyMobile portable digital recorder and have those recordings transcribed right into a document.
NATURAL FORMATTING - Users can dictate numbers, email addresses, and more using natural language. For example, a user could say "Sixty-seven dollars and twenty-six cents," and see $67.26 appear on the screen.
HIGHLY ACCURATE - BestMatch™ technology reduces errors for most users by an additional 25% over previous versions.
LARGE ACTIVE VOCABULARY - The active vocabulary comes with more than 72,000 words that are ready to use. Over 230,000 words are on disk and can be automatically retrieved by the system. Each word contains spelling, pronunciation, and language usage information for high accuracy. Users can customize the vocabulary with new words, proper names, and specialized terms.
SAPI 4.0 SUPPORT - Support for industry standard API ensures that Dragon NaturallySpeaking will seamlessly integrate with future speech-enabled Windows applications that employ this standard.
SPEECH PLAYBACK - Recorded speech playback allows users to listen to what they said for easier proofreading and editing. The text-to-speech feature allows users to have words that appear on the screen read aloud to them using high quality text-to-speech from ELAN Informatique™ .
TRUE CONTINUOUS SPEECH - Users speak naturally and at a normal pace without the need to pause between words. Dragon NaturallySpeaking was the first product on the market that recognized large vocabulary general-purpose continuous speech.
DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING ENTERPRISE
PRODUCT FAMILY:
DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING ENTERPRISE - This system includes all of the major features that made Dragon NaturallySpeaking America's #1 selling continuous speech product (PC Data). It includes Dragon's BestMatch technology for superior accuracy, Natural Language Commands with Select-and-Say editing, dictation into virtually any Windows application, Dragon NaturallyMobile for transcription of recorded speech, recorded speech playback, and text-to-speech for easier editing. Enterprise also has the ability to use speech commands created by Value Added Resellers and corporate MIS departments.
DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING ENTERPRISE PROFESSIONAL - Contains all of the features of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise and adds sophisticated customization features for the user who creates significant amounts of text. The Professional Edition includes multiple user and topic configurations, increased active vocabulary sizes, text-to-speech capabilities, recorded speech, which allows for complete hands-free operation of a PC.
DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING ENTERPRISE LEGAL- This product is designed specifically for the legal market. It allows attorneys, judges, paralegals, legal secretaries, and others in the legal profession to improve their productivity by creating documents, briefs, notes, and correspondence completely by voice.
DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING ENTERPRISE MEDICAL- Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise Medical is a continuous speech recognition system specifically designed for medical professionals to create patient records, medical reports, notes, correspondence and other documents. Medical professionals can dictate directly into Microsoft® Word or Corel® WordPerfect®.
AVAILABILITY AND SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise is scheduled to begin shipping in Q2 1999.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise operates on individual PCs and accesses speech files stored on the network. The system supports Windows 98, Windows 95, and Windows NT. Clients on the network require a minimum 133 MHz Pentium Processor IBM compatible PC, 32 MB RAM for Windows 95, and 48 MB RAM for Windows NT. To take advantage of improved accuracy with Dragon's BestMatch Technology, users require an additional 16 MB RAM. Dragon NaturallySpeaking Enterprise operates on any network that provides directory service to Windows, including Windows NT and Novell NetWare. The system supports a broad range of built-in audio and industry standard sound cards, including Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 and compatibles, as well as notebooks with built in 16-bit audio. Proprietary speech cards are not required for either desktops or portables.
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