James K. Baker

Biography

Together with his wife and colleague, Janet MacIver Baker, James K. Baker has reshaped the field of automatic speech recognition with innovations that allow speech to be accurately converted to text and computers to be controlled with spoken commands. In 1982, the husband-and-wife team founded Dragon Systems, Inc., famous for its highly accurate commercial voice dictation systems and many industry firsts. Released in 1997, Dragon NaturallySpeakingTM was the first general-purpose continuous dictation system, quickly establishing worldwide market leadership and winning numerous industry awards. Today’s applications range from general-purpose dictation, voice transcription, and audio search to speech interfaces for smartphones and automotive systems. Individually, Dr. James Baker is best known for his pioneering work in introducing the efficacy and power of stochastic processing and Hidden Markov Models (a statistical method for the recognition of speech) to automatic speech recognition.

Dr. James Baker is currently a Distinguished Career Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and focuses on new paradigms for automatic learning, especially to help develop speech technologies for all the languages of the world.