Dragon to Ship Low-Cost Speech Recognition 

by Brian McWilliams, PC World News Radio 
April 2, 1998 

How would you like to visit a chat room on AOL or other online service and be
able to speak your mind out loud, rather than furiously keying in text? 

That's the idea behind a new voice-recognition package from Dragon Systems
called Dragon Point & Speak, which the company expects to ship later this
month. Point & Speak will be available in places like Wal-Mart and Staples,
and with a list price of $60 it's aimed at consumers who want an easy way to
dictate text into word processing, chat, or e-mail applications. 

Dragon's Rene Blodgett says Point & Speak uses the same continuous speech
engine as the company's NaturallySpeaking product, which sells for $100 more.
While it doesn't do voice command and control, Blodgett says Point & Speak
enables you to dictate directly into any Windows application. 

As Blodgett describes it, "You just point at the area where you want to
start, [speak,] and the words just appear."  

Dragon says Point & Speak is 95 percent accurate. It will run on Windows 95
or NT 4.0 and requires a 133-MHz Pentium processor and at least 32MB of RAM.

http://www.dragonsys.com/frameset/currentnews3.html