DragonDictate

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~ the last words ~

Nine thousand dollars. That was one seat of DragonDictate when Dragon Systems began selling it in March 1990, which is why it lived in law offices and inside disability budgets rather than on anybody's home machine. I was six years old that spring and still eight years away from my first modem. This one was never going to be mine.

Dragon Systems was James and Janet Baker, two researchers who had been working on statistical speech recognition since the seventies and who founded the company in 1982. DragonDictate was what came out the other end: a discrete speech engine with a thirty thousand word vocabulary, running on DOS, on hardware that had no business doing this. It shipped with a Shure cardioid headset because the microphone mattered as much as the software did.

Discrete speech is the detail everyone forgets. You could not talk to it. You had to say. Each. Word. Separately, with a real pause between them, because the recognizer had no way to find the boundary between two words spoken normally. Every user learned a strange clipped cadence, and there are recordings of people from that era who kept the habit years after the software stopped needing it.

And it still changed lives, which is not a thing you can say about most 1990 software. For someone with a repetitive strain injury or without the use of their hands, DragonDictate was the difference between having a job and not having one. The price tag looks obscene until you compare it against the alternative, which was nothing at all.

~ the record ~

~ how it worked ~

Underneath was a trigram language model, so the engine was constantly guessing which word came next based on the two before it. That is the same basic idea that everything since has scaled up beyond recognition, and in 1990 it was running on a desktop with a few megabytes of memory. You trained it by reading to it, and it got measurably better at your specific voice over weeks.

The correction loop was where you spent your life. A wrong word meant stopping, invoking the correction window, picking from a numbered list of alternates, and going again. People built real speed with it anyway, which says more about how badly they needed it than about how smooth it was.

~ what replaced it ~

In 1997 Dragon shipped NaturallySpeaking, which heard continuous speech at ordinary conversational pace, and DragonDictate for Windows was finished the moment that happened. Nobody was going back to pausing. Dragon Systems itself was sold to Lernout & Hauspie in June 2000 for about 580 million dollars in stock, and when that company collapsed the Bakers lost effectively everything.

The name did come back. MacSpeech Dictate was rebranded Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0 on 20 September 2010, ran through version 4, then became Dragon for Mac in September 2015. Nuance discontinued the entire Mac line on 22 October 2018, keeping perpetual licenses alive with no further updates. Twenty eight years after a nine thousand dollar box taught people to speak in fragments, the name left the market quietly and macOS was left with only Apple's own dictation.

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