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Comment by eghad | Hacker News Reader

And what do you suggest is better? I've worked with nearly every tool (open source and closed) under the sun in medical, industrial, and personal settings and Dragon NaturallySpeaking/Professional was by far the best in terms of accuracy regardless of prosody, accent, background noise, technical terms used, etc.

Personally I think they should've been acquired a decade ago.

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That answer depends on the language and on your use case. It seems like you're asking about desktop apps, but my parent was not talking in that context. Indeed there's not a lot of choice there because there's no money in it.

I'm even talking vs custom trained models with Kaldi (was working on a startup that was trying to create lessons for public speaking so we could grab enough data to tackle accent remediation/help those with aphasic speech disorders) and again just reiterating, the out of the box performance of Nuance's products are just better than anything else.

Obviously Nuance is more than just speech recognition, but still not sure why people are downplaying how good they were at it.

EDIT: or maybe it's just too prohibitively expensive for people outside of medical/legal fields to know about? And don't get me wrong, I love that things like Talon Voice are widely available for hands free coding, I just hope this means NaturallySpeaking will supplant Windows Dictation.

If you have the data and a specific domain you can focus on then building a custom model [with kaldi] should always win. That's what I've done in the past (beating google, nuance etc.). You most likely didn't have the data and/or didn't know kaldi well.

> Obviously Nuance is more than just speech recognition, but still not sure why people are downplaying how good they were at it.

Because nuance wasn't very good.. at least in all the benchmarks I've seen. It's been a while since I compared numbers it's possible they've improved a lot. They're also known for kinda being dicks with the contracts they offer in B2B.

I've used it in medical in a multi-lingual setting and there it's basically the only game in town.

Where do you think dragon is used to its maximum efficiency as compared to siri,alexa in places of home automation and other menial tasks

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