Janet MacIver Baker

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Biography

Together with her husband and colleague James K. Baker, Janet MacIver 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. In addition to technical contributions ranging from signal processing to audio search engines, Dr. Janet Baker has also helped initiate international projects to create large nonproprietary databases and to foster rigorous performance evaluation methodologies.

An IEEE member, Dr. Janet Baker is currently affiliated with MIT Media Lab and Harvard Medical School, and conducts neuroscience research applying machine learning to speech and language processing in the brain.