Nuance Communications has added new dictation, transcription and customisation capabilities to its new suite of Dragon professional productivity solutions, Dragon Professional Individual, version 15 and Dragon Professional Individual for Mac, version 6.

Deep Learning technology utilised in the speech engine, promises increased accuracy for more users, with an enhanced ability to learn individuals’ voice patterns and accents, and deftly adapt to acoustics in open office or mobile environments.  This latest Dragon release marks the first time Deep Learning capabilities can run embedded on a personal computer leveraging a users’ speech data to improve their own language and acoustic model.

"Deep Learning is a powerful pattern recognition technique inspired by the way the human brain learns and interprets sensory input, which Nuance has leveraged to advance accuracy across our speech recognition technologies, including Dragon,” said Vlad Sejnoha, Chief Technology Officer, Nuance Communications. 

“Training such Deep Neural Net models typically requires large amounts of training data and a high-performance computing environment.  However, our new Dragon portfolio includes our latest breakthrough that allows Dragon’s Deep Neural Nets to continuously learn from the user’s speech during use on a standard personal computer, and drive accuracy rates in some instances up to 24 percent higher.”

The new Dragon also brings with it advanced transcription, powerful customisation, and an improved ability to work with portable touchscreen PCs, extending the benefits of speech recognition to more mobile use cases and environments.   As a result, documents are completed with higher accuracy in a fraction of the time, giving professionals across a number of industries – such as legal, public safety, social services and education – the ability to focus more on mission-critical tasks.

Dragon Professional Individual will be available for download in English in Asia Pacific markets on 1 September, 2016. Physical product shipments will be available by mid-September.