If you have gone looking for Dragon NaturallySpeaking recently and come away confused, that is fair enough. The name you remember is not on sale any more, but the software behind it never actually went away — it was renamed, reorganised, and repriced, and some editions were dropped along the way. Here is the short version.

Dated claims on this page carry a small link to the primary source beside them — Nuance's own advisory and support pages, Microsoft's pages, and the app stores. We re-check the sources each time this page is updated; the date is at the top.

The short answer

  • The name changed in 2015. Version 13, from 2014, was the last release sold as Dragon NaturallySpeaking. With version 14, Nuance renamed the product Dragon Professional Individual.
  • The current Windows version is Dragon Professional v16, released in February 2023 and still sold. Nuance describes it as optimised for Windows 11 and backwards-compatible to Windows 10. Nuance
  • The home edition is the part that is gone. Nuance ended sales of Dragon Home 15 — along with the rest of the version 15 line — on 27 February 2023. Nuance advisory
  • There is no Mac version. Nuance discontinued its Mac product on 22 October 2018 and has not sold one since. Nuance support
  • The mobile app is gone too. Dragon Anywhere stopped being sold, and stopped taking new subscriptions and renewals, on 1 July 2026 — the notice is in the app's own store listing. App Store
  • Nuance is now part of Microsoft. The acquisition was announced in April 2021. Microsoft The deal closed in March 2022. Microsoft

The naming, untangled

Most of the confusion is just branding. "Dragon NaturallySpeaking" was the consumer-facing name for years, and it is still the phrase most people type into a search box. Nuance moved to an individual-versus-group naming structure with version 14, so the product people knew as Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional became Dragon Professional Individual, and later simply Dragon Professional. Same lineage, different label.

So if you are searching for a Dragon NaturallySpeaking download and finding nothing official, that is why. The current locally installed Windows product in the same Dragon family is Dragon Professional v16 — and there is no current Home edition. Nuance

What Nuance retired, and when

The dates below come from Nuance's own product advisory and support pages, and from the Dragon Anywhere store listing:

  • 22 October 2018 — Dragon Professional Individual for Mac discontinued. Existing perpetual licences keep working, but the software receives no updates. Nuance support
  • 27 February 2023 — end of sale for the English and German editions of Dragon Professional Individual 15, Dragon Professional Group 15, Dragon Legal Individual 15, Dragon Legal Group 15, Dragon Law Enforcement 15, and Dragon Home 15. Nuance advisory
  • 1 September 2023 — end of support for the version 14 products, all editions and languages. Nuance advisory
  • 1 July 2026 — Dragon Anywhere Mobile "no longer available for sale. Purchasing new subscriptions and renewing existing subscriptions is no longer possible", per the notice in its App Store version history. App Store

In the same advisory, Nuance states that it "will no longer provide updates to these products, including security patches and fixes". That is worth knowing if you are still running version 14 or 15: the advisory does not switch anything off, but those versions are no longer receiving security updates. Nuance advisory

Version 16 is a separate, current product and is not covered by that advisory.

What you can buy from Dragon today

  • Dragon Professional v16 — the Windows desktop product, and the direct descendant of the product you remember. As of this page's last update, Nuance's product page does not display a price; it directs buyers to contact the company. Licensing and packaging vary by country, reseller, and organisation, so confirm the current terms before you buy. Nuance
  • Dragon Professional Anywhere and the Dragon Medical products — cloud and healthcare offerings, primarily marketed to organisations through sales-assisted channels.

If you are still running an older Dragon

Nuance's advisory says this directly: owners of a perpetual v14 or v15 licence "are not required to take any action", and Nuance "is not taking any specific action to make your Dragon solution any less usable". Nuance advisory Plenty of people still dictate with these versions daily. Three practical things to keep in mind:

  • Version 14 and 15 no longer receive updates, including security patches. That matters more if the machine is used for sensitive work.
  • Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 on 14 October 2025. Microsoft Nuance says Dragon v15 and v16 continue to be supported on Windows 10, but that if a problem is caused by the operating system itself, its guidance is to move to Windows 11 and Dragon v16. Nuance support
  • Older versions were built for older versions of Windows, and continued operation on future hardware and Windows releases is not guaranteed. If you move to a new PC, check compatibility before you assume your licence will carry over.

If any of those pushes you to look around, the rest of this page covers the options.

Windows dictation options worth knowing about

Dragon Professional v16 is the product Nuance still sells for deep customisation. Its own page lists custom voice commands, transcription of recorded audio, and central management tooling for organisations. If those are the features you rely on, it is the current version of the tool you already know. Nuance

CaringDictate ($49 one-time) is our own product, so treat this as the interested party talking. It was built for straightforward dictation: press a key, talk, and the words appear in whatever program you are typing in. Recognition runs on your own computer rather than in the cloud, updates are included, and there is a free 7-day trial and a 30-day refund. It does not try to match Dragon's full command-and-control feature set — it aims at people who mainly want to type with their voice without a subscription. Side-by-side comparison here.

Windows Voice Access is included with Windows 11 (version 22H2 and later) at no extra charge. It combines dictation with voice control of the operating system, and once you have set it up and let it download its speech files, it works without an internet connection. It is worth trying first precisely because it costs nothing — you will quickly find out whether it suits how you work. Microsoft

Subscription dictation apps occupy the middle ground: a number of newer tools charge a monthly or annual fee rather than a one-off price. Each vendor publishes its own current pricing and privacy details — the two things worth checking are where the recognition actually runs, on your computer or on their servers, and what the fee adds up to over the years you expect to keep dictating.

Apple Dictation is free and built into macOS and iOS, which makes it relevant only if you are moving away from Windows altogether. Apple

What about accuracy?

Dragon earned its reputation on accuracy, and it lets you train custom vocabulary and pronunciations for specialised terminology — a real advantage if your work depends on terms most software has never seen. Nuance

What has changed since the NaturallySpeaking era is the baseline. Modern general-purpose speech models — OpenAI's openly published Whisper family among them — are trained on very large, varied audio and produce strong results on clear speech with no per-user voice training at all, and a number of newer dictation tools are built on them, CaringDictate included. OpenAI

Which tool comes out ahead on your desk depends on your voice, your vocabulary, your microphone, and the room you dictate in. The honest way to decide is to run the same short test on your own voice in each tool you are considering, inside its trial window — the word error rate guide shows exactly how to do that in ten minutes.

Moving your custom words across

If you built up a custom vocabulary in Dragon — medical terms, client names, product codes — that list is worth keeping. Export it from Dragon before you change anything.

What happens next depends on the tool you move to, and it is worth checking rather than assuming: some programs can bulk-import a word list, and others add words one at a time. CaringDictate is in the second group. You add each term in Settings → Writing tools → Personal dictionary, with an optional "replace this" spelling for the ways it tends to come out wrong, and the app also suggests corrections it has noticed in your own recent dictation. There is no bulk import of a Dragon word list today — so if your list runs to hundreds of entries, start with the twenty terms you actually dictate every week and add the rest as they come up.

A sensible way to change over

  1. Write down what you actually use Dragon for — dictating into Word, email, web forms, voice commands. Most people use a fraction of the features.
  2. Try the free option first. Voice Access is included with Windows 11 at no extra charge — set it up, let it download its speech files, and see how it handles your normal writing.
  3. Trial anything paid inside its refund window, and use it for real work for at least a week rather than testing it for ten minutes.
  4. Move your custom vocabulary over.
  5. Keep Dragon installed until the new setup has handled a full month of normal use.

Where to go next

For a direct feature-by-feature look, see the CaringDictate and Dragon comparison. To measure accuracy on your own voice instead of trusting anyone's claims, see the word error rate guide. If typing is difficult because of arthritis, tremor, MS, or another condition, the condition guides go into what tends to help in each case.