Enter the Dragon

The Dragon is out: Representatives of Nuance Communications, Inc., provider of speech and imaging solutions, today unleashed Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical version 9, an upgrade to the firm’s speech recognition solution designed specifically for medical professionals.

According to Nuance’s numbers, Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical 9 converts up to 160 words’ worth of speech per minute into text, and the new release is reported to “[boost] accuracy by as much 30 percent, moving accuracy levels up to 99 percent, and also removes [a problem] that has typically created resistance to trying speech recognition – ‘training’ or ‘enrollment.’”

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 is purported to be the first-ever desktop speech recognition product to eliminate up-front training yet deliver accurate results from the go. Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical also adds speech to virtually all Microsoft Windows applications. Enhanced network support for version 9 should allow users to access Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical from any workstation, an LAN, or thin-client Citrix terminals.

Other new features and improvements especially pumped are improved system accuracy; enterprise features in an effort to ease administration; further optimization for medical environments; specific integration with Microsoft Office, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Corel WordPerfect, Mozilla Firefox, and Mozilla Thunderbird; fourteen medical specialty vocabularies covering sixty subspecialties, plus customization tools; and greater mobility via diction to mobile devices such as digital recorders, Palm Tungsten and Tablet PCs for automatic transcription when synched with the PC. The new release also allows network administrators to install and manage Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical over a network. The suggested retail price for Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical 9 is US $1199.