DEVELOPMENTS
If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else. -Lawrence J. Peter
Nuance marks 20 years of Dragon Nuance Communications today announced that its signature software solution – Dragon – turned 20 this year. Since its launch in 1997, Dragon’s trajectory has been impressive and its future appears equally exciting.
dictation from pretty much any device and from any reasonable environment. The user can expect excellent and instantaneous performance as the software quickly and accurately transcribes spoken words into type.
voice recognition and transcription increased considerably over the years according to Derek. ‘Since the solution was launched we have seen a steady clipping of Dragon’s average error rate by around 18%.
To understand just how far voice recognition software has evolved, consider that in the early 1980s technology experts were struggling to develop a system that would understand about 35 words that were spoken carefully, deliberately and in isolation.
‘The vision from the beginning was that Dragon would transform the way people create documents,’ said Derek Austin, Dragon Business Manager, Asia Pacific, Nuance. ‘Instead of typing contracts, reports, correspondence, records, case notes and so forth, people would use their voice to create documents to help boost productivity.’
‘The software has also been able to take on more ambitious applications. Initially Dragon could only be deployed in a quiet environment with people using headsets and careful enunciation. Today, users speak naturally, can dictate from a distance and in a variety of environments, including noisy offices, outdoors and inside cars.’
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Dragon’s ability to deliver quality
These improvements have occurred thanks to a combination of factors. Algorithms applied to recognising speech have been getting steadily better, while the evolution of more powerful computing platforms allowed Nuance to use more training data to improve its sophisticated models. However, the most transformative factor has been the influx of deep learning into speech recognition. This has propelled Dragon’s performance rapidly. Today, Dragon leverages the latest in Deep Learning technology to constantly learn and adapt to the user’s unique voice and environmental variations, even while the user is dictating, to deliver new levels of personalised accuracy and productivity.
So what does the future hold for Dragon? Its versatility is key. Not only will the software continue to drive document creation, its speech recognition capacity underpins the capabilities that virtual assistants will deliver in the future. ‘We are already seeing a glimpse of this,’ explains Derek. ‘Dragon not only creates messages, it can also send an email, do a web search and control applications on your device if instructed. ‘As virtual assistants evolve, they will probably follow the user from device to device, and a combination of natural language understanding, artificial intelligence, voice recognition, knowledge representation and other modalities will allow the user to interact with an immensely rich world of content, services and smart devices. ‘For instance, in the future you arrive at your hotel and your room is icy cold. You could try and work out how to adjust the temperature in your room or you could tell your portable virtual assistant to raise the temperature for you. ‘By using standardised protocols the virtual assistant will be able to interface with devices, understand what they do and how to operate them, and translate your request to achieve the desired outcome.’
Immersive booths to bring business expos to life Technology that brings standard exhibition booths alive with video projections has launched this month.
something over your face in a crowded room is such that you just can’t do it. But we wanted to find a way we could produce an immersive type experience without having to interrupt someone naturally,” he said.
The immersive booth technology is the brainchild of Andy Roberts, the founder of Rogue Lumens, a technology company in Adelaide, South Australia.
Roberts and his team came up with a software program that allows projectors to seamlessly turn the three sides of a standard 9sq m booth into screens.
In a previous role, Roberts had travelled the world attending conferences and was constantly uninspired by the static displays of posters and logos on show.
The software package allows companies to upload photos or videos and easily produce them into an eye-catching display that moves across all three walls. Companies can also upload professionally-produced work.
“At an exhibition in October 2016 I was standing there and it occurred to me that we could do a lot more in a booth by introducing new technology,” said Roberts. He first looked into incorporating augmented or virtual reality but found the technology was not ready for a mass market. “The uncomfortable interruption of having someone ask you to put
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and incorporates a human outline to ensure the scale is correct. “It is all put together with a bespoke interface that companies can make with their own content – such as photos and video – and the software scales it,” said Roberts. “We’ve had the luxury of actually being in the position of being at exhibitions so we are solving a problem we’ve had ourselves. We were thinking about the tools we would have wanted and we would have needed, which gives a very different insight on how you approach the problem.”
“We built our own software and web portal to solve how we would populate this size of screen,” said Roberts.
The business model is to approach expo hire companies to lease the technology for large conferences, which will keep prices comparable to normal booth kit out fees.
The web portal allows users to see what their booth would look like from all angles as people approach the stall,
Roberts displayed the technology at the Adelaide Convention Centre this month, highlighting the work of IIoT
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company Dematec Automation. “Because we have approached this with a price sensitive mindset there are no consumables, just a bit of labour, and this brings the price down,” said Roberts. “We want to make a difference to conferences. We want to make sure that lots of booths look good, not just one or two, and that’s why we have worked hard to bring the price point down to a point that is acceptable to the people who are going to be exhibiting.”