Dragon SDK Client (DSC) Edition Integrate the speech recognition capabilities of Dragon NaturallySpeaking into any Windows application without using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking user interface. Dragon Medical & Professional speech recognition products accurately and quickly transcribe your voice in real time. Voice commands enable you to perform tasks infinitely faster than with just a keyboard and mouse. Learn about the best Dragon Speech Recognition alternatives for your Machine Learning software needs. Read user reviews of Google Cloud AI, Azure Machine Learning Studio, and more. Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software provides an astounding accuracy rate of up to 99% and accuracy continues to increase the more you use the software. Dragon also never misspells a word, so typos are a thing of the past. Nuance® Dragon® Medical Practice Edition 4 Speech Recognition Software for Windows Cutting-edge technology brings efficiency to the clinic environment with superior speech recognition, amplified for medical use. Simple setup, easy-to-use functions, dependable performance and optimized for portable touchscreens.

Reinventing the relationship between people and technology

Nuance technology innovations in voice, natural language understanding, reasoning and systems integration come together to fit seamlessly into your life, your business and your world. Whether you are looking for high functioning speech recognition or intelligent document management solutions Nuance offers award winning technology for individual, enterprise and mobile use.

Dictation and Speech Recognition: Dragon Speech Recognition software includes solutions for a range of industries including Accessibility (Dragon Pro Individual), Healthcare (Dragon Medical), Legal (Dragon Legal), Education (Dragon Pro Individual Student/Teacher Edition) as well as Business and the Public Sector (Dragon Pro Individual or Group, Dragon Anywhere and Dragon for Law Enforcement). For Enterprise the Nuance Management Center (NMC) simplifies license distribution and vocabulary/command management for improved documentation productivity.

Document Management and Imaging: Nuance provides the software and solutions to gain optimal control of your document and information processes driving greater productivity and security. Nuance workflow organization and industry leading OCR solutions (OmniPage family), PDF editing (PowerPDF and PDF for Mac) and document capture and management (PaperPort) allow you to take charge of the documentation that powers your organization.

Earlier today, Microsoft announced its plans to purchase Nuance for $56 per share—23 percent above Nuance's closing price last Friday. The deal adds up to a $16 billion cash outlay and a total valuation for Nuance of about $19.7 billion, including that company's assumed debt.

Who is Nuance?

Nuance is a well-known player in the field of natural language recognition. The company's technology is the core of Apple's Siri personal assistant. Nuance also sells well-known personal speech-recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is invaluable to many people with a wide range of physical disabilities.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking, originally released in 1997, was one of the first commercially available continuous dictation products—meaning software that did not require the user to pause briefly between words. In 2000, Dragon Systems was acquired by ScanSoft, which acquired Nuance Communications in 2005 and rebranded itself as Nuance.

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Earlier versions of Dragon software used hidden Markov models to puzzle out the meaning of human speech, but this method had serious limitations compared to modern AI algorithms. In 2009, Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li created ImageNet—a massive training data set that spawned a boom in deep-learning algorithms used for modern, core AI tech.

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After Microsoft researchers Dong Yu and Frank Seide successfully applied deep-learning techniques to real-time automatic speech recognition in 2010, Dragon—now Nuance—applied the same techniques to its own speech-recognition software.

Fast forward to today, and according to both Microsoft and Nuance, medically targeted versions of Dragon are in use by 77 percent of hospitals, 75 percent of radiologists, and 55 percent of physicians in the United States.

Microsoft’s acquisition play

Microsoft and Nuance began a partnership in 2019 to deliver ambient clinical intelligence (ACI) technologies to health care providers. ACI technology is intended to reduce physician burnout and increase efficiency by offloading administrative tasks onto computers. (A 2017 study published in the Annals of Family Medicine documented physicians typically spending two hours of record-keeping for every single hour of actual patient care.)

Acquiring Nuance gives Microsoft direct access to the company's entire health care customer list. It also gives Microsoft the opportunity to push Nuance technology—currently, mostly used in the US—to Microsoft's own large international market. Nuance chief executive Mark Benjamin—who will continue to run Nuance as a Microsoft division after the acquisition—describes it as an opportunity to 'superscale how we change an industry.'

The move doubles Microsoft's total addressable market in the health care vertical to nearly $500 billion. It also marries what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes as 'the AI layer at the healthcare point of delivery' with Microsoft's own massive cloud infrastructure, including Azure, Teams, and Dynamics 365.

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The acquisition has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both Nuance and Microsoft and it is expected to close by the end of 2021.