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- HOW LONG DOES DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING SOFTWARE LAST UPGRADE
- HOW LONG DOES DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING SOFTWARE LAST PROFESSIONAL
- HOW LONG DOES DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING SOFTWARE LAST WINDOWS
There is nothing new about mergers and acquisitions as a business strategy. Microsoft promised lots of synchronicity and integration when it acquired LinkedIn five years ago and virtually none of it has come to fruition. So imagine that Microsoft integrates the Nuance technology into the Office programs, improving the voice recognition in Word and Outlook without Dragon’s dated interface and heavy memory use. Dragon users can easily capitalize and correct mistakes and do a variety of other things that the Microsoft dictation software can’t handle. The word recognition isn’t bad but there are some pretty serious shortcomings in the controls. See the “Dictate” button on the right side of the Word ribbon? It’s been there all along but you don’t use it because it’s pretty weak. Microsoft has built voice recognition into Word for years. Microsoft has long since accepted that the consumer market belongs to Apple and Google, who have built very effective voice recognition into iOS and Android.īut let’s imagine a happy ending to the Microsoft/Nuance marriage for consumers and small businesses. There is little reason for Microsoft to spend time or energy on the legacy dictation programs that you or I might use. It looks like a good deal for both sides. Microsoft will capitalize on Nuance’s relationships with electronic health record providers and healthcare companies, and integrate its cloud systems and AI expertise into Nuance’s products (or vice versa). Microsoft has been looking for ways into the healthcare industry for many years, so Nuance is a natural fit. You can still buy a copy of Dragon in a box with a microphone, just like we bought at Best Buy fifteen years ago, but Dragon’s dictation programs for consumers are a legacy on their last legs.
HOW LONG DOES DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING SOFTWARE LAST UPGRADE
We’re cheap and needy and we don’t upgrade programs often enough to be profitable.
HOW LONG DOES DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING SOFTWARE LAST WINDOWS
Nuance’s other primary business today is cloud-based voice recognition for enterprises, used by employees as well as call centers and answering systems.īut the company discovered years ago that selling Windows programs to individual consumers is a pain in the ass. Dragon combines a hyper-focused medical vocabulary with AI analysis in the cloud the result is unparalleled accuracy for physicians. Nuance developed a variety of speech recognition and documentation products for the medical industry that have been very successful, dominating the market in 2021 for medical charting and radiology. A couple of unrelated divisions (automotive, document imaging) have been spun off. Mark Benjamin took over as Nuance CEO in 2018 and began a transformation of Nuance into a company with a tight focus on AI-driven voice recognition for healthcare and enterprises. For me, though, it’s even more interesting to look at the history of the company, which goes back to the birth of personal computing and includes lots of names that stir up memories from the distant past, as well as illustrating a business practice which perhaps has not been very good for the modern world. I’ll tell you a little bit about that below. The future of the company lies in healthcare and enterprises. It has spent the last few years finding such interesting things to do that Microsoft just agreed to acquire the company for nearly $20 billion dollars. If dictation software for PCs isn’t Nuance’s primary business, then what has it been doing lately?įunny you should ask. It’s almost as if selling licensed software to individuals isn’t very important to them anymore.
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HOW LONG DOES DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING SOFTWARE LAST PROFESSIONAL
The current dictation software for individual PCs from parent company Nuance Communications is Dragon Professional Individual and it costs $500, which suggests pretty strongly that they don’t expect anyone to buy it. Over the years the name changed and the price went up. Dragon was quirky, buggy, and frustrating, but it also could be very accurate and we had no other options. If you’re an old-timer like me, you probably have memories – maybe fond memories, maybe not – of Dragon Naturally Speaking, for many years the only dictation software for Windows that was even remotely useful.