Dragon Planning NaturallySpeaking for Macintosh

In a joint announcement at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, Apple and Dragon Systems revealed that Dragon plans to develop Macintosh-compatible speech recognition products based on its market-leading NaturallySpeaking continuous speech recognition products. The lack of continuous speech recognition on the Macintosh has been a thorn in Apple’s side, particularly since Apple helped pioneer speech recognition on personal computers with PlainTalk in 1994. In the past, Dragon representatives have repeatedly claimed the Mac OS isn’t suitable for continuous speech recognition products; that well-established stance and the lack of technical detail in Dragon’s announcement have lead to speculation that products from Dragon may only be available for Mac OS X, which offers substantially different memory and process management features than the existing Mac OS 8.x. Dragon says an American English product will be released in late 1999, to be followed by products for British English, French, German, and Japanese; no pricing details, specifications, or system requirements have been released.