Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS) is a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, which was acquired in turn by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, Nuance Communications, and Microsoft. It runs on Windows personal computers. Version 15 (Professional Individual and Legal Individual), which supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, 8 and 10, was released in August 2016. Features Dragon NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal user interface. As an example, dictated words appear in a floating tooltip as they are spoken (though there is an option to suppress this display to increase speed), and when the speaker pauses, the program transcribes the words into the active window at the location of the cursor. (Dragon does not support dictating to background windows.) The software has three primary areas of functionality: voice recognition in dictation with speech transcribed as written text, recognition of spoken commands, and text-to-speech: speaking text content of a document. Voice profiles can be accessed by different computers in a networked environment, although the audio hardware and configuration must be identical to those of the machine generating the configuration. The Professional version allows creation of custom commands to control programs or functions not built into NaturallySpeaking. History Dr. James Baker laid out the description of a speech understanding system called DRAGON in 1975. In 1982 he and Dr. Janet M. Baker, his wife, founded Dragon Systems to release products centered around their voice recognition prototype. He was President of the company and she was CEO. DragonDictate was first released for DOS, and utilized hidden Markov models, a probabilistic method for temporal pattern recognition. At the time, the hardware was not powerful enough to address the problem of word segmentation, and DragonDictate was unable to determine the boundaries of words during continuous speech input. Users were forced to enunciate one word at a time, clearly separated by a small pause after each word. DragonDictate was based on a trigram model, and is known as a discrete utterance speech recognition engine. Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997. Joel Gould was the director of emerging technologies at Dragon Systems. Gould was the principal architect and lead engineer for the development of Dragon NaturallyOrganized (1.0), Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile Organizer (3.52), Dragon NaturallySpeaking (1.0 through 2.02), and DragonDictate for Windows (1.0). Gould also designed the tutorials in both