Nuance Acquires MacSpeech

Nuance Communications today announced that it has acquired MacSpeech, the leading provider of speech recognition solutions for Apple Macintosh computers. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The agreement will allow Nuance to extend the Dragon NaturallySpeaking family of products to the growing community of Mac users as a native Mac application.

“We have heard from our customers — and from the Mac community at large — for years that they want Dragon for the Mac environment,” said Peter Mahoney, Nuance’s senior vice president and general manager of the Dragon product line. “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.”

Through the acquisition of MacSpeech, Nuance hopes to accelerate the growth opportunity for MacSpeech products by adding additional research and development support, Dragon brand recognition, marketing support, and distribution channels. In addition, the acquisition presents more growth opportunities for Dragon NaturallySpeaking with new audiences and new devices.

 “MacSpeech responded to the growing demand for a native Macintosh, high-quality speech recognition solution with MacSpeech Dictate integrated with the Dragon speech recognition engine,” said Andrew Taylor, president of MacSpeech. “We are excited to become part of the Nuance team and accelerate our ability to deliver great speech solutions to the Mac community.”

Mahoney, in announcing the acquisition, assured MacSpeech users that  “nothing will change in the near term.” Nuance, he wrote, “values the MacSpeech brand. Nuance and MacSpeech teams are working together on branding and product integration.”