Nuance acquires MacSpeech
Speech-to-text wizard Nuance Communications has acquired MacSpeech, the leading provider of speech recognition solutions for Apple computers, in order to extend it’s reach into the Mac realm.
Peter Mahoney, senior vice president and Nuance’s general manager for Dragon, said of the acquisition, “We have heard from our customers — and from the Mac community at large — for years that they want Dragon for the Mac environment. In 2008, MacSpeech licensed our underlying Dragon dictation technology to deliver MacSpeech Dictate, and the demand has only continued to grow, fueled recently by our recent launch of Dragon Dictation for the iPhone. MacSpeech’s knowledge of the Mac platform and its deep understanding of Mac users, coupled with our decades-long experience with speech recognition and the popular Dragon brand, will allow us to provide the world’s best dictation technology in a solution that is 100-percent Mac.”
When Dragon launched the Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search Apps for the iPhone, they quickly became popular, according to a Marketwatch article. They were offered initially for free, of course, with a provision that they may become a paid app in the future. That certainly helped to make the two apps more popular. They are still shown as being free in the App Store, so it is possible that they will remain free of charge and Dragon (with MacSpeech on board) will develop a more complex speech-to-text application for the iPhone before they begin charging for apps.
Pairing Dragon technology with MacSpeech’s proven track record on the Mac platform should give Dragon a leg up in development for Apple, allowing them to reach Mac users more quickly with a better product. For their part, Mac users may well be happy that such a well-respected speech-to-text set of applications is coming to the Mac. It may well be that giving away their small apps on the iPhone may be a way to prepare Apple computer (and iPad / Touch) users for buying into the full Dragon set of apps.
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