Janet Baker

Janet MacIver Baker is an American computer scientist, neuroscientist and entrepreneur. She is most known for founding Dragon Systems with her husband, James K. Baker, a speech recognition company that developed Dragon NaturallySpeaking in 1997, the world's first general-purpose speech dictation/transcription software.

Janet Baker studied biophysics at Tufts University, and earned her PhD in speech recognition from Carnegie Mellon, a major hub for artificial intelligence and speech technology research. She also studied neurophysiology and AI at Tübingen University, MIT, and Rockefeller University.

After earning her doctorate in 1975, Baker joined IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where she continued research on large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition.

In 1982 Janet and James Baker co-founded Dragon Systems. Dragon Systems initially operated without venture capital, relying on revenue from contracts and early speech-recognition products. In 1997 the company introduced Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Dragon Systems was later purchased by Lernout & Hauspie in 2000, which later became part of Nuance. This led to Dragon System's technology being incorporated into leading speech technology systems including Siri, with hundreds of millions of users interacting with their technology.

In 2012 Janet and James Baker received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award for their "fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of automatic speech recognition."

Baker is currently affiliated with the MIT Media Lab.