Dragon NaturallySpeaking
Dragon released the first mass-market product that recognised continuous speech: dictation at an ordinary pace.
Why it matters
The bet placed in 1975 on a single probabilistic model reached a shop shelf twenty-two years later.
The product was announced in New York on 2 April 1997 and went on sale in June at 695 dollars. By Technology Review in 1998, IBM released ViaVoice at 99 dollars in August, and Dragon cut its price first to 299, then to 199 dollars; contemporary sources do not confirm that price list: Computergram of 22 September 1997 gives ViaVoice a retail price of around 200 dollars, and the Boston Globe of 13 November 1997 lists NaturallySpeaking at 129 dollars for the Personal Edition, 169 for Preferred and 695 for Deluxe. It ran on an ordinary Windows 95 computer with a sound card and needed no separate speech board; the company said an experienced user could dictate at over a hundred words a minute. This is the point at which speech recognition stopped being a research topic and became an industry. The next jump came only in 2011, when acoustic models were replaced by deep networks.