Tomorrow’s Tech Treepowered by Astra

Language & Translation · Recorded milestone

Dictation software

Recorded year1990

Dragon Dictate turns speech into text on a personal computer.

Explore this milestone on the interactive map

Built on

Information theoryRecorded · 1948requires
First speech recogniserRecorded · 1952enables
Personal computerRecorded · 1975enables

Led to

Voice control on phonesRecorded · 2009enables
Caption glassesRecorded · 2022enables
Near-human speech recognitionRecorded · 2022enables

Sources & evidence

Additional source

Dataset updated 2026-10-18. This individual record has not been separately re-reviewed.