Nuance (News - Alert) Communications, which provides IVR and other speech recognition solutions, has gained a significant number of customers in India.

According to a recent news piece in Business Standard, Nuance Communications’ (News - Alert) Dragon NaturallySpeaking software is redefining legal services in India. Several high courts in India have already implemented the voice recognition system to transcribe legal documents.

Dipen S, a practicing attorney in AP High Court, says, “I regularly give dictations running into hundreds of pages. But availability of stenographers was always an issue. With the Dragon software, I can now give dictations even at midnight from my home. The accuracy is almost 97 percent and the typing speed is very fast. I have drafted hundreds of petitions and the software actually learns from experience.”

Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software lets users dictate documents, send and manage e-mail and give commands to their computers. Compared to traditional typing, Dragon software is three times faster. It also contains a vocabulary of 30,000 legal terms, automatically formats legal citations and supports third-party correction to help you achieve accuracy in dictating.

The service, according to Nuance officials, is the first of its kind in India. Thanks to its success in legal departments, the voice recognition software now finds accelerated adoption in other departments like Income Tax Department, Reserve Bank of India and National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD).

Building on its success in legal industry, Nuance is also planning to popularize its medical speech recognition software named Dragon Medical. The medical transcription software is already being used by several hospitals in India facilitating faster delivery of medical reports and discharging summaries to patients.

“If you go to these hospitals, it is not unusual to see a physician speak to an iPhone (News - Alert) or iPad, documenting an electronic health record,” says Rao.

Technologies such as voice-verification are also being used for authenticating and recording attendance in social schemes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). It has helped eliminate fraudulent cases.

Earlier this year, Nuance Communications announced partnership with Spansion (News - Alert) to improve speech-recognition technology for car makers. The enhanced solution is based on the software and semiconductors offered by both the companies.