At a time when speech recognition applications are moving more into the mainstream retail space and gaining mind share among more casual computer users, Dragon Systems Inc has cut the price of its flagship product by more than 50%. The Newton, Massachusetts company will be offering a special edition of its Naturally Speaking product, essentially the first large- vocabulary continuous-speech application on the market. It will offer a preferred edition for about $230 that contains most of the features of the $700 deluxe edition. The difference, Dragon says, is that the cheaper version doesn’t have the extended macros that allow the deluxe edition to be customized for the specialized vocabularies used by legal or medical professionals. Although Dragon is a private company and won’t divulge sales figures, it does say that in four months Naturally Speaking has already outsold its earlier-generation discrete speech product, Dragon Dictate, which has been selling since 1990. Naturally Speaking preferred edition requires a 133-MHz Pentium processor and 32Mb of RAM for Windows 95, or 48Mb for Windows NT.
