Dragon NaturallySpeaking became a speech recognition software powerhouse under the banner of ScanSoft. When the company acquired Nuance in a deal brokered in 2005 valued at $220 million*, ScanSoft continued under the name Nuance. As vendors of the Dragon software series, HCD also offers a range of support services such as training and tech support. Going beyond simply selling a “boxed product”, Human Capital Development ensures its customers are given the necessary customisation in order to get optimal results.
This typically involves building their custom vocabularies, adjusting their voice profile to accept unique characteristics, selecting best options based on usage as well as designing and implementing autotext or custom commands. These range from simple deployments of boilerplate templates to more advanced multi-level custom commands that can do several tasks housed under one voice command. In doing these customisations and tailoring the speech recognition software for best possible results, the line between offering a software product and service can become blurred.
This is to say that as experts, we’ve come to know the product and its capabilities to the point that some of our customers may even think we have a hand in its programming or research and development. While this is an easy assumption to make based on the depth of assistance we offer, it can be misleading and misconceptions around ownership. HCD provides productivity solutions and services, which include technical support and in-depth training, but our hands are tied when it comes to the actual programming of the software.
It’s an arduous task to keep Dragon fully compatible with various applications and with updates coming at regular intervals, this can be a real challenge. Unfortunately, as much as we are super users – there are limitations to what we can do when clients encounter issues. Luckily we’ve dealt with a number of matters as relates to tech support, fixes and the restoration of profiles when things go awry. However, there are tech-related things that are almost unfixable.
When software goes into legacy status, it means Nuance no longer officially support the product and don’t anticipate releasing service packs or patches to address any issues. This means you may end up with speech recognition software that becomes non-functional over time by virtue of its age. It also means that you may encounter a tech issue that is regarded as unfixable or one that we haven’t encountered before. Pooling our experiential knowledge we can usually present a workaround solution if not a complete fix for the problem. We’d just ask that you appreciate our role as service providers rather than authors of the product.
*Read more about the ScanSoft/Nuance merger.