SRC Wins Innovation Award for Dragon Professional Vocabularies

LONDON, ENGLAND - UK-based SRC's work in developing vocabularies for use with speech recognition software has been recognized by ScanSoft awarding the company its inaugural Award for Innovation. SRC developed a suite of ten professional vocabularies to enable professionals in the finance, legal, healthcare, company secretarial and surveying sectors to achieve increased accuracy when using ScanSoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional speech recognition software. The vocabularies were considered to be of such high quality that they are now sold by ScanSoft resellers branded as the Dragon Professional Vocabularies. "SRC's extensive experience in developing sector specific and bespoke vocabularies has been an important element of their successes with speech recognition implementations. We're delighted that for the first time, customers of other Dragon partners and resellers will also be able to benefit from the increased accuracy and shorter learning curves that these vocabularies provide," ScanSoft UK Sales Manager, Dave Stevens, said. "We were so impressed with the quality and performance of the professional vocabularies that we selected SRC to receive the ScanSoft Award for Innovation. The award was presented at a ceremony in December 2002, where SRC also picked up three other awards for excellence in their desktop speech recognition business," Mr Stevens said. "A dedicated vocabulary to match the needs of clients is absolutely vital to achieve maximum usability and accuracy, which is why we have invested significant resources into developing the Dragon Professional Vocabularies," SRC CEO, Chris Hart, said. To develop each vocabulary, SRC undertook extensive research on each of the topics and collected millions of words of sector specific data. This data was then processed using SRC's unique data cleaning tools, before pronunciations were added for each word and phrase. Finally, the vocabularies were thoroughly tested to maximise accuracy 'out-of-the-box'. "Our initial benchmark testing document returned an 89% speech recognition accuracy on professional texts. On completion of the professional vocabularies, retesting with the same documents showed an immediate accuracy improvement to 97%. These errors were then pinpointed and the software was trained to remember them," Mr Hart said. The new Dragon Professional Vocabularies CD includes vocabularies for City Finance, Company Secretarial, Corporate Law, Family Law, Litigation Law, Medical, Personal Injury, Property Law, Surveying Management and UK Tax. The CD has an SRP of £199 ex-VAT and is available through ScanSoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking Partners and Resellers.