Seagate Technology Inc has paid an unspecified amount to up its equity stake in speech recognition technology company Dragon Systems Inc to roughly 35%. The additional investment in Dragon, a private company, comes more than two years after the storage giant took an initial 25% stake in July of 1994. Seagate apparently wanted to buy all of Dragon back then, but had to settle for what it could get. Seagate is the only outside investor in Dragon, according to president and co-founder Janet Baker, who seems content with her company’s private status as well as its relationship with Seagate. Seagate’s interest in Dragon is mainly a financial one – which aids in the ongoing effort to diversify itself from its core disk drive business – although the two companies have worked on a joint project, according to Baker. The work will result in a product called Dragon Phone Query for Crystal Info, a continuous speech technology-based telephone interface for the decision support program Seagate gained in its acquisition of Crystal Computer Services Inc in 1994. The product will be demonstrated at Comdex later this month. Dragon, founded in 1982, is headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts and has subsidiaries in the UK and Germany.
