Janet MacIver Baker is the cofounder of Dragon Systems, a speech recognition company that introduced the world's first general-purpose speech dictation/transcription software, Dragon NaturallySpeaking® in 1997. Dragon's technology has been incorporated globally into leading applications, including Apple's Siri, cloud-based services, automotive navigation/control systems, healthcare systems, smart TVs, and more, with many hundreds of millions of users.
During the past decade, Baker has collaborated with neuroscientists to analyze how the human brain processes acoustic signals, speech, language, and music, using neurophysiology and machine learning. As an MIT Research Affiliate, she collaborates with MIT Media Lab to create novel user interfaces, especially for wearable technologies, to augment cognition and expand human/machine capabilities.
Baker was an International Speech Communication Association Fellow in 2010 and in 2012 was awarded the IEEE James Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award. She earned a BS in Biology from Tufts University and a PhD in computer science/AI from Carnegie Mellon, where CHM Fellow Raj Reddy was her thesis advisor. She also studied neurophysiology and AI at Tübingen University, MIT, and Rockefeller University.
