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Nuance Communications is a computer software technology company. Their worldwide headquarters is in Burlington, Massachusetts in the United States. Nuance provides speech and imaging solutions and is mainly known for its speech recognition and speech synthesis software that power some of the world's largest automated telephone applications. Previously, the company focused mainly on desktop productivity software, like desktop dictation and imaging software. The company was known until October 2005 as ScanSoft, and before 1999 as Visioneer. Desktop software products in the company's portfolio include its desktop voice-recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking (formerly Dragon Dictate), the optical character recognition software OmniPage, document management software PaperPort and various other desktop and enterprise speech and imaging technologies.
The company has been in the news after 13 R&D engineers from the Menlo Park and Montreal offices defected to Yahoo! (September, 2005).
Company history
The company was founded in 1992 as Visioneer, Inc. It changed its name to ScanSoft in 1999. Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as OmniPage and PaperPort.
Acquisitions
- Mar. 2000 – Caere Corp., of Los Gatos, California – $145 million
Starting in 2001, ScanSoft entered the speech and telephony markets with a series of acquisitions of companies in the speech recognition and synthesis space.
- Dec. 2001 – Lernout & Hauspie, of Merelbeke, Belgium, Speech and Language division – $39.5 million
This acquisition occurred following Lernout & Hauspie's bankruptcy proceedings. Previously, Lernout & Hauspie had acquired speech technology companies BBS, Centigram Communications Corporation, FDC, Dragon Systems (in 2000) and Kurzweil AI (in 1998).
- Oct. 2002 – Phillips Speech Processing, Dialogue Systems – $35.4 million
Phillips had previously acquired Voice Control Systems, which had in turn had acquired Pure Speech, Scott Instruments and VPC.
- Aug. 2003 – SpeechWorks, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts, – $132 million
SpeechWorks' major products were speech recognition and synthesis systems, which were merged with Nuance's speech product line. The name SpeechWorks has been reincarnated as the brand name for all of ScanSoft's networked and embedded speech solutions.
SpeechWorks had previously acquired both Eloquent Technologies, Inc., of Ithaca, New York in 2000 for $17 million and T-Netix.
- Jan. 2004 – LocusDialog, of Montreal, Quebec
- May. 2004 – Telelogue, Inc., of Iselin, New Jersey
- Nov. 2004 – Phonetic Systems, Ltd., of Burlington, Massachusetts and Israel – $35 million
- Nov. 2004 – ART Advanced Recognition Technologies, Ltd., of Tel Aviv, Israel – $21.5 million
- Nov. 2004 – Rhetorical Systems Ltd., of Scotland – $6.7 million
- Sep. 2005 – Nuance Communications, of Menlo Park, California – $221 million
The entire company renamed itself Nuance Communications on October 18 2005. Nuance is publicly traded (Nasdaq: NUAN). The company's ticker symbol changed from SSFT to NUAN on November 21, 2005.
- Feb. 2006 - Dictaphone Corporation, of Stratford, Connecticut - $357 million
Consumer products
External links
Software companies | Companies listed on NASDAQ | 1992 establishments
"Nuance Communications"