Nuance
Analysis of speech recognition vendor Nuance and its products, including Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Related subjects include:
The Text Analytics Marketplace: Competitive landscape and trends
As I see it, there are eight distinct market areas that each depend heavily on linguistic technology. Five are off-shoots of what used to be called “information retrieval”:
1. Web search
2. Public-facing site search
3. Enterprise search and knowledge management
4. Custom publishing
5. Text mining and extraction
Three are more standalone:
6. Spam filtering
7. Voice recognition
8. Machine translation
So what’s the state of speech recognition and dictation software?
Linda asked me about the state of desktop dictation technology. In particular, she asked me whether there was much difference between the latest version and earlier, cheaper ones. My knowledge of the area is out of date, so I thought I’d throw both the specific question and the broader subject of speech recognition out there for general discussion.
Here’s much of what I know or believe about speech recognition:
- Most major independent commercial speech recognition efforts have wound up being merged into Nuance Communications. That goes for both desktop and server-side stuff. None was doing particularly well before its respective merger. Read more