ScanSoft, Inc. (quote) announced the immediate availability of Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8, a new release of the speech recognition solution designed specifically for law firms and legal professionals. Already in use by thousands of legal professionals and law firms worldwide, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal converts speech into text at up to 160 words per minute, reducing or eliminating the costs associated with manually creating documents and transcripts.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8 represents a breakthrough in speech recognition capabilities for legal professionals and organizations, including:

• Accuracy - Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8 achieves unsurpassed speech recognition accuracy, delivering up to 99 percent overall accuracy and more than 25 percent improvement over the previous release.
• Mobility - The new release provides a breakthrough in mobility through its Roaming User capability. Where in the past users were limited to using speech recognition on a dedicated PC, ScanSoft's Roaming User feature implements patent-pending technology that allows a legal professional to use speech recognition from any PC within the local network.
• Specialty - The solution delivers a breakthrough in supporting a specialized legal vocabulary with more than 25,000 legal terms, and formatting capabilities for legal citations.
• Compatibility - Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8 provides seamless speech input capabilities with existing practice management systems.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8 speech-enables virtually all Microsoft Windows applications, including most practice management systems, as well as Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect and Lotus Notes. By using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to automate the capture of documents, forms, emails and other materials, legal professionals can eliminate the time and expense associated with manual transcription services, ultimately improving client service through faster document turnaround.

"I used to dictate into a hand-held tape recorder, and my assistant would later perform the transcriptions for me," said John Bogart, attorney, Bedinger, Crockett, Peterson, Greenwood and Casey. "Now I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal and perform the work myself. The product not only saves me a significant amount of time, but it also frees up my assistant to work on other things."

Network administration capabilities within Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8 deliver value to mid-to-large-sized legal organizations. Installation and maintenance of multi-seat and site deployments are simplified through support for MSI (Microsoft Installer), while centralized management for voice profiles and custom vocabularies is made possible through the ScanSoft DNS Administrator.

ScanSoft has also recently delivered the Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK, which is used by developers and integrators to incorporate speech-to-text and voice command capabilities directly into in-house and commercial applications. The Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK supports integrating both real-time dictation and batch processing capabilities into applications, on either desktop clients or server systems.

To help legal organizations improve the quality of client service care, and reduce or eliminate manual transcription costs, ScanSoft has added a number of key features to Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8, including:

• Most Accurate Ever - Significant improvements to the Dragon NaturallySpeaking recognition system has yielded an unprecedented accuracy improvement of up to 25 percent over the previous release, resulting in speech recognition accuracy levels as high as 99 percent.
• Specialized Vocabulary - Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8 provides a specialized vocabulary of more than 25,000 legal terms, and formatting capabilities for legal citations, and also makes it easy to add additional words to existing vocabularies, or to create new custom vocabulary sets.
• Roaming User - In a patent-pending new capability, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8 allows legal professionals to access their unique user profiles anywhere on their network, and automatically synchronizes updates and voice adaptations centrally. This enables legal professionals to use speech from any location, while ensuring the highest accuracy results possible.
• Mobile Dictation Support - Legal professionals can use ScanSoft-certified handheld recorders, Pocket PC or Palm Tungsten devices to dictate on the go. Recordings can be processed through Dragon NaturallySpeaking by the legal professional or an assistant, with a transcription created automatically.
• Improved Voice Commands - Legal professionals can create customized simple commands that will automate complex, multi-step tasks - a word or phrase will trigger the insertion of standardized text or instantly execute a command that may have required multiple "points and clicks."
• Network Administration - Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal is available with a pre-configured MSI file for push installations throughout a network environment. The ScanSoft DNS Administrator utility enables IT professionals to manage and update user profiles and vocabularies from a central network location.
• Speech Recognition for Developers and System Integrators - The Dragon NaturallySpeaking SDK (Software Developers Kit) enables integrators to add custom speech capabilities to commercial and in-house practice management systems, and can be deployed on a central server for "offline" or "back-end" speech recognition.

"The dramatic improvements in accuracy and mobility that we bring to the table with this release make speech recognition a reality for legal professionals," said John Shagoury, president, ScanSoft Productivity Applications Division. "Dragon NaturallySpeaking Legal 8 delivers real benefits to legal professionals - in large firms or small practices - by reducing costs, minimizing turnaround time for client files, and improving overall client service."