Nuance Introduces Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 11; Increased Accuracy, Improved Correction Combine to Boost Productivity, Reduce Legal Transcription Costs

In conjunction with its launch of Dragon NaturallySpeaking version 11, Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 11, enterprise-ready speech recognition software that lets legal professionals create documents and control their PCs by voice to boost productivity and drive down costs.

Priced 33 percent lower than previous versions, Dragon Legal 11 enables a more efficient document editing and correction workflow for legal support staff, and also allows lawyers to take charge of their own dictation, so that they can simply speak their briefs, contracts, case documentation, correspondence and more – in the office or on the go. With Dragon Legal, law firms and corporate legal departments can reduce spending on legal transcription services, and can also shift staff resources from transcription to other – billable – activities.

Designed specifically for the legal community, Dragon Legal includes a special language model to help achieve up to 99 percent accuracy, automatically formats citations, and offers third-party correction features to speed document turnaround and make support staff more efficient. Legal professionals can save even more time with custom voice commands to build and format document templates, and can dictate into a digital voice recorder on the go for automatic transcription of audio files upon connection to a PC. Dragon Legal also provides security features, configuration options, and administrative tools for managing large user networks.

See what attorney Nicholas Harding has to say about Dragon Legal here.

Key benefits in Dragon Legal include:

• Experience Accuracy and Speed – Dragon 11 is the most accurate speech recognition yet, with an improvement in accuracy of 15 percent compared to Dragon 10. This means Dragon 11 recognizes speech more accurately, so legal professionals will spend less time correcting recognition errors. Dragon 11 is also faster than previous editions when selecting application menu items by voice or executing voice commands.
• Eliminate Transcription Bottlenecks – Streamline transcription and review workflow. Dragon Legal can monitor incoming audio files, automatically convert each file into a text document, and then route the audio and transcript text to support staff. Dragon’s Voice Notations feature allows the speaker to make "side comments,” such as specific instructions, that are saved as part of the recorded dictation but do not appear as part of the transcribed text.
• Make Support Staff More Productive – Rather than creating documents from scratch, support staff can rely on Dragon Legal to deliver a transcribed draft of audio dictation for simple editing and correction, dramatically decreasing document turnaround time and making support staff more productive. Dragon Legal is the only edition of Dragon to offer robust third-party correction features to streamline the editing and correction process, including an option to save synchronized audio from dictation done in DragonPad, Word, WordPerfect and OpenOffice Writer, as well as tools to automate the transcription of saved audio files so that support staff can easily review and edit text.
• Use Dragon to Transcribe Recorded Audio – Customers can record case notes and memos, using a Nuance-approved digital voice recorder or smart phone application — from anywhere, at anytime — and automatically transcribe text when the audio file is sent to the PC. Creating a new user profile for a digital recorder or smartphone, or adding a digital recorder as a new audio source for an existing user profile, is much faster with Dragon 11: the minimum reading time required to train Dragon with a recorder has been reduced from 15 to 4 minutes. Dragon Legal also directly accepts more audio file formats than ever before, including .DSS and .DS2 files, with no need for conversion.
• Boost Productivity on the Go – Legal professionals can use a wireless microphone with Dragon Legal at the PC in order to pace the office or access a file across the room without disrupting document creation.
• Save More Time with Macros, Voice Commands and Shortcuts – Easily create special voice commands to build and format document templates, insert frequently used text and graphics, or automate common workflow tasks like saving a document under a certain name, printing it, and attaching it to an email. Dragon also collapses common multi-step tasks on the PC into direct voice commands. Legal professionals can send emails and schedule client meetings, search the Web for information, search the desktop, or even navigate between Windows, simply by speaking.
• Communicate More Naturally – The latest release of Dragon makes it easier than ever to communicate more naturally with a new Dragon Sidebar to help users discover and remember commands and tips; a richer Help system with new tips, illustrations, tutorials and videos; an updated toolbar that allows users to discover and quickly access important Dragon features
• Correct and Edit with Ease – Dragon makes editing and correcting text easy. With Dragon’s Quick Voice Formatting commands, issue a simple voice command, such as "Bold Client Report,” or "Capitalize Court Proceedings” to make formatting text faster than ever. With Dragon 11, it’s easy to edit or correct a word or phrase if there are multiple matches by displaying a number next to each. In addition, corrections entered using the keyboard (in addition to those made by voice) are used to adapt the user’s profile and boost accuracy. Finally, the Correction Menu now suggests more alternate recognitions by default and enables users to quickly add phrases to the vocabulary, or to prevent an undesired word from being recognized.
• Get Started with Dragon Quickly and Easily – Establishing a user profile in Dragon is now simple and conversational, and setting up a microphone or new audio source is more clear and straightforward.
• Experience Enhanced Hardware and Software Support – Dragon 11 is compatible with Microsoft Office 2010 applications and Full Text Control, Menu Tracking, and Natural Language Commands are supported for Word 2010, Outlook 2010, and Excel 2010. With Dragon 11, users can now comfortably view the Dragon user interface and tutorials on netbook (mini notebook) computers. Finally, Dragon 11 supports OpenOffice Writer with dictation, correction, selection, and playback.

NOTE to editors – Nuance will be in Booth #227 and Ironwood Demo room 4 at ILTA 2010.

Availability

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 11 is available now for $799 from Nuance and through Nuance’s value added resellers worldwide. For additional information on features, editions, pricing and volume licensing programs, please visit http://www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking/industries/legal/default.asp.

About Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance is a leading provider of speech, imaging and customer interaction solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications and professional services. For more information, please visit: www.nuance.com.

Trademark reference: Nuance, Dragon, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and the Nuance logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other company names or product names referenced herein may be the property of their respective owners.