[Athen] Nuance acquires MacSpeech

[Shelley Haven]

Now this could be really good!  Speech recognition for both Macs and  
Windows PCs will now be under one roof:

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/02/16/nuance-acquires-macspeech-beefs-up-plans-for-dragon-speech-recognition-for-mac/

Nuance Acquires MacSpeech, Beefs Up Plans for Dragon Speech  
Recognition for Mac

Nuance Communications today announced that it has acquired MacSpeech,  
the leading provider of speech recognition products for the Mac  
platform. MacSpeech's "Dictate" product for Mac OS X, selected as Best  
of Show at Macworld San Francisco 2008, already utilizes Nuance's  
Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition engine and will allow  
Nuance to build on its current success with Dragon applications for  
the iPhone and move into the Mac environment.
"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, senior vice president and general manager for  
Dragon, Nuance Communications. "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."

According to the press release, Nuance plans to leverage its existing  
Dragon branding and expertise in marketing, distribution, and research  
and development to drive growth of the MacSpeech line of products.

Late last year, Nuance introduced its free Dragon Dictation  
application for the iPhone, which has remained the #1 free application  
in the App Store's "Business" category since its release. The release  
was followed up by the launch of Dragon Search, a free voice-enabled  
search application for the iPhone capable of interfacing with such  
sources as Google, Bing, YouTube, and Wikipedia.


____________________________
Shelley Haven  ATP, RET
Assistive Technology Consultant
Shelley at TechPotential.net
www.TechPotential.net



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