Nuance's Dragon Becomes More Multilingual

Nuance Communications today released plans to expand Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search applications to include European and American Spanish. Both Dragon apps are now available in the Apple's App Store in Spain.

“Nuance used a variety of Latin American Spanish data in developing these models," says Matt Revis, vice president of product management and marketing at Nuance. “It is optimized for North American Spanish, but supports many Latin American accents. As part of our global rollout of Dragon Dictation and Search, we expect further optimizations for regional dialects in the future.”

Since December 2009, users have been able use the Dragon apps to speak text into email, blog posts, and search queries in U.S. and U.K. English, French, German, and Italian. Nuance says messages entered with voice can be transcribed four times faster than typing. Dragon users can also move among languages as they become available.

"The demand and the success we've experienced with the Dragon Mobile apps globally in just one year is amazing," said Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, in a statement. "Our support for Spanish is part of our continued commitment to bringing the power of Dragon to more places around the world in more languages, and we're not done yet—not even close."

While Revis couldn’t share specifics about what’s next for Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search, he says Nuance will continue to roll out both in other parts of the world during the coming year. “It’s going to be very exciting,” he says.