History of Dictation Software: A Dated Timeline

Kept, 2 figuresweb:https://ai.meta.com/blog/multilingual-model-speech-recognition/

Maker's own May 22, 2023 announcement of MMS with a dated headline and a quoted language count; facts cover the launch date and the 1,107-language coverage.

Kept, 2 figuresweb:https://github.com/openai/whisper/discussions/2363

Official release post by the Whisper maintainers, dated Oct 1, 2024, naming large-v3-turbo and its 4 decoder layers.

Kept, 6 figuresweb:https://docs.cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/docs/release-notes

Google Cloud's dated changelog; the chirp_telephony launch, two Chirp 2 updates and the Chirp 3 preview and GA entries each carry their own date.

Not keptweb:https://news.microsoft.com/2022/03/04/microsoft-completes-acquisition-of-nuance-communications/

Full text not reachable: curl returned a security block page and WebFetch returned HTTP 404, so no quotable completion announcement was read.

Not keptweb:https://news.microsoft.com/source/2022/03/04/microsoft-completes-acquisition-of-nuance-communications/

Full text not reachable: the URL returned a security block page to curl, so no quotable completion announcement was read.

Not keptweb:https://www.geekwire.com/2022/microsofts-19-7b-nuance-deal-is-finally-final-nearly-a-year-after-it-was-announced/

Full text not reachable: the page returned a security block to curl and HTTP 403 to WebFetch; a news report would need its closing date quoted from the text.

Not keptweb:https://voicebot.ai/2022/03/07/microsoft-completes-19-7b-nuance-acquisition/

Full text not reachable: the page returned a security block to curl, so no closing date or quote could be checked.

Not keptweb:https://www.auntminnie.com/imaging-informatics/artificial-intelligence/article/15630481/microsoft-completes-acquisition-of-nuance-communications

Full text not reachable: the page returned a security block to curl, so no quote could be checked.

Not keptweb:https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=1002517&type=8-K&dateb=&owner=include&count=40

Filing index only: it lists Nuance 8-K dates and accession numbers but the completion filing's text was not opened, so no quotable closing statement exists.

Not keptweb:https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/1/whisper-large-v3-turbo-model/

Personal link blog repeating the October 1, 2024 release; the primary announcement is the maintainers' GitHub post, which is used instead.

Not keptweb:https://news.microsoft.com/2021/04/12/microsoft-to-acquire-nuance-to-accelerate-ai-for-healthcare-and-enterprise/

Full text not reachable: the page returned a security block to curl, so the April 2021 deal announcement could not be quoted.

Not keptDragon NaturallySpeaking first release (1997) and major versions

No official page found with a dated 1997 launch or dated major-version release. Nuance's Dragon 16 release notes give no release dates, and the nuance.com company history and the Nuance 25th-anniversary blog were not reachable (404, then a redirect to an unrelated Microsoft page). The only dated 1997 and version-date sources in the catalog are trade press, Wikipedia and a reseller, none of them th

Not keptNuance discontinues Dragon Professional for Mac (2018)

No official Nuance notice of the 2018 Mac discontinuation was reachable: dragon.nuance.com returned 404 and searches returned only secondhand reports. The 22 October 2018 date appears only in a reseller blog (dictate.com.au) and trade press (The Register, LoopInsight), so the official-figure requirement is not met.

Kept, 1 figureMicrosoft completes acquisition of Nuance (2022)

Microsoft's own newsroom announcement, dated March 4, 2022, states the completion of the acquisition of Nuance Communications Inc. Reuses the published fact microsoft-nuance-acquisition-completed-2022 from news.microsoft.com; the newsroom page itself was blocked from curl, but its completion sentence was confirmed via WebFetch.

Not keptIBM ViaVoice launch and discontinuation

No IBM page with a dated ViaVoice launch or discontinuation was reachable. The 1997 launch appears only in press and news reports (IDG News Service, 20 August 1997, reprinted by Stanford's RESNA archive, and Telecompaper), and the 2002 Linux SDK withdrawal only in an IBM list moderator's post quoted by Slashdot and in later mailing-list posts. IBM's own 1999 ViaVoice OEM briefing (public.dhe.ibm.c

Kept, 1 figureSiri launch on iPhone 4S (2011) with dictation

Apple's October 4, 2011 launch press release dates the introduction of Siri on iPhone 4S, which is the row. The release does not mention dictation, so the row records Siri only, and no Apple page dating dictation on the iPhone 4S was found in search.

Kept, 1 figureApple Dictation arrives on the Mac (OS X Mountain Lion, 2012)

Apple's July 25, 2012 Mountain Lion press release describes Dictation as a feature of the release. Reuses the published fact mac-dictation-introduced-mountain-lion-2012 from the same Apple page; its data point is written to the points file.

Not keptMicrosoft Speech Recognition in Windows 10 online speech

Microsoft's Windows 10 speech support page (support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468250) describes online speech recognition and its on/off setting but gives no dated launch, change or stop of the feature, and no price, count or share; its only date, the end of Windows 10 support on October 14, 2025, concerns the operating system.

Kept, 2 figuresWhisper large-v3 and large-v3-turbo releases

Two dated release posts by the Whisper maintainers in the official openai/whisper repository: large-v3 on November 6, 2023 and large-v3-turbo on October 1, 2024.

Not keptApple Enhanced Dictation (offline) on Mac (2013)

Apple's Mac Help pages for macOS 10.13 and 10.14 say Enhanced Dictation works offline, but no official page dates its 2013 introduction: the Oct 2013 OS X Mavericks newsroom release does not mention dictation, and support article HT5449 no longer carries it.

Kept, 1 figureApple on-device Siri speech recognition announced (WWDC 2021)

Apple's June 7, 2021 newsroom release states the on-device speech recognition change for Siri requests, with the date printed on the page.

Kept, 1 figureApple SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber announced (WWDC 2025)

Apple's WWDC25 session 277 page announces the SpeechAnalyzer API; the page has no date of its own, so the June 2025 month is taken from the WWDC25 event.

Kept, 1 figureWindows Speech Recognition introduced in Windows Vista (2006/2007)

Microsoft Learn's Windows Vista Speech Recognition guide (marked Updated June 2007) says speech recognition is part of the operating system. It gives no launch date, so the row is dated to the guide's June 2007 update, not to the release.

Kept, 1 figureWindows voice typing Win+H introduced (2018 or Windows 11 2021)

Microsoft's Windows Insider Blog, dated June 8, 2017, announces the new dictation hotkey Win + H for desktop dictation in build 16215. The official date is 2017, not 2018 or 2021, and it is an Insider preview announcement.

Kept, 1 figureWindows Voice Access released (2022)

Microsoft's Windows Experience Blog, dated September 20, 2022, announces the Windows 11 2022 Update and lists voice access (preview) among its accessibility features. The page labels it a preview; the December 2021 Insider build is not counted as the release.

Kept, 1 figureWindows Speech Recognition deprecated (2023)

Microsoft's Learn list of deprecated Windows features dates the deprecation of Windows speech recognition to December 2023 and its replacement by voice access; reuses the existing fact and its row.

Kept, 1 figureGoogle voice typing on Android introduced

Google's Android Developers Blog post of 12 December 2011 says voice typing is a new feature available in Android 4.0. The post date is the only dated figure; the Android 4.0 release date is not stated on the pages read.

Kept, 2 figuresGoogle Docs voice typing launched (2015)

Google's Docs Blog post in its September 2, 2015 archive introduces Voice typing in Docs (activate from the Tools menu in Chrome) and gives a count of more than 40 languages; the post shows no date in its text, so the date comes from the archive.

Kept, 1 figureGboard offline speech recognition (2019)

Google's own research blog post, dated March 12, 2019, announces the all-neural on-device Gboard speech recognizer that works when the phone is offline; the date is the row's figure.

Not keptMicrosoft Word Dictate launched (Office 365, 2017-2018)

No official figure gives a launch date for Dictate in Word or Office 365: Microsoft's Dictate support page states no date or subscription version, and Microsoft's June 21, 2017 Translator blog post describes a Microsoft Office add-in (Garage project) that does not name Word or give an Office 365 date.

Not keptOpenAI Whisper released (September 2022)

OpenAI's announcement page (openai.com/index/whisper/) returned HTTP 403 to both direct fetch and WebFetch, so its date could not be read; the official openai/whisper GitHub README is reachable but states no release date. Re-check the OpenAI page when it is reachable.

Not keptOpenAI gpt-4o-transcribe released (March 2025)

No official figure could be read. OpenAI's announcement page (openai.com/index/introducing-our-next-generation-audio-models/) returned HTTP 403 to curl and to WebFetch, and the platform.openai.com model page returned no response. Search snippets give March 20, 2025, but that date was not quoted from the maker's page, so no fact was written.

Kept, 2 figuresNVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 and v3 released

NVIDIA's own model cards state the release dates: 05/01/2025 for parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 and 08/14/2025 for parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3, both read from the raw README on Hugging Face. Two facts, one per model, each a Model release row with its own date.

Not keptWispr Flow launched

No official page gives a dated launch. The home page, blog, about page and help-center overview (wisprflow.ai, docs.wisprflow.ai) were readable but state no launch date. The September 30, 2024 launch is reported only by press-release reprints and news sites, and the Business Wire original returned no response. The plan prices on the pricing page are undated, so they are not timeline rows.

Kept, 2 figuresSuperwhisper launched

No launch date on the homepage, the quickstart and introduction docs, or the changelog. The changelog's earliest dated entry is version 1.11.0 (Aug 3, 2023), so two dated feature releases from the maker's changelog are recorded instead.

Not keptMacWhisper launched

No official page gives a launch or release date: the macwhisper.com homepage has none, and macwhisper.com/changelog and /about return 404. The earliest dated coverage found is third-party news from February 2023, which this job does not use.

Kept, 1 figureOtter.ai launched (2016)

The 2016 founding or launch year does not appear on otter.ai/about, the company page, the press page, or the boilerplate of its press releases, so it is not recorded. A dated 2026 press release from the company's own press page is recorded as a launch row instead.

Kept, 1 figureTalon Voice first release

Talon's own changelog dates version 0.1.0 (Sep 20, 2020) as the cross-platform public release. Its earlier versions are dated only to 2017 to 2020, so no exact first-ever release day appears on the maker's pages; the row is the first dated public release.

Kept, 1 figureDeepgram Nova-3 released (2025)

Deepgram's developer changelog dates the Nova-3 release to February 12, 2025, and its availability line names Nova-3 English as available through the API. The row is the English launch; the pricing and language pages are not dated events.

Kept, 1 figureMistral Voxtral released (2025)

Mistral's own blog post carries a July 15, 2025 byline announcing the Voxtral models. The row dates the announcement; the post gives no separate availability date. The benchmark figures are in the research paper, not on this page, and the existing Voxtral Transcribe 2 price is a 2026 price, not this launch.

Kept, 1 figureAmazon Alexa launched (2014)

Amazon's own June 23, 2015 press release says it introduced Echo seven months earlier, which dates the launch to November 2014; no Amazon page gives the day, and the 2014 year is calculated from that phrase.

Kept, 1 figureGoogle Assistant launched (2016)

Google's own I/O 2016 post, dated May 18, 2016, introduces the Google assistant; it is the announcement date, and phone and speaker availability came later.

Not keptDragon Anywhere mobile launched

Nuance's own launch release (Dragon Anywhere for iOS, dated December 3, 2015) is hosted only on Business Wire, which returned HTTP 403 to every fetch, so its quote could not be checked; the Nuance product page gives no launch date, and a 9to5Mac reprint of the release was not used because it is not the maker's page.