News and journalism
U.S. Company Introduces First Speech 'Typewriter'
Deseret News, Deseret News, 1990
Read the originalRead on October 16, 2026
- What it is
- A news report of 23 March 1990 on Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, and its DragonDictate system, which took spoken words and printed them. It gives the price, the hardware needed and the vocabulary size as the company stated them.
- How much weight it carries
- A contemporary newspaper report that repeats the company's own claims, including the claim to be the first commercially viable speech typewriter. The figures are the company's, not independent tests, and the article does not give a benchmark for accuracy.
Facts taken from this source
- DragonDictate, launched in 1990, cost $9,000 as a system of software and a speech recognition board.
“The $9,000 system consists of software and a speech recognition board” (Paragraph on the hardware and price)
- DragonDictate recognized discrete utterances, which the 1990 report defines as words with at least a quarter-second pause between them.
“words with at least a 1/4-second pause in between” (Paragraph on how the system recognizes speech)
- In March 1990, Dragon Systems introduced DragonDictate, which the company said was the first commercially viable typewriter that works by human speech.
“what it says is the first commercially viable” (Opening paragraph)