Nuance acquires MacSpeech

I hope for the best. One must remember however that Dragon once developed for the Mac platform before, only to abandon it. (most of that has to do with their back end code being intel specific however, and, the apparent health of Apple at the time).

Now if Adobe can merely be convinced to properly develop for the Mac OS again.

Nuance also aquired Jott last July. It seems like thay are really consolidating the majority of speech tech under their umbrella. They make quality products, but the complete lack of competition could drive prices up.

This should yield improvements. I use Dragon NS 10 in Parallels on a Mac Pro and it works as good as dictation software can. MSD, not so much.

Does that mean I will finally be able to run Dragon NaturallySpeaking natively, instead of under VMware Fusion?

(before you point out the obvious, no, MacSpeech Dictate isn't quite the same thing)

This is worrying, insofar as I hear terrible things about Nuance's tech support and customer service.

I just hope they reduce the price! Our campus bookstore sells Dragon for something like $79 while the features-inferior MacSpeech is around $150. So while I've been running Dragon in boot camp mode (it works really well on a MBP, even without a microphone!) it's still a pain in the ass to have to switch OSes just for dictation. (Now, I have used Dragon on Windows 7 in VMware Fusion, but the performance is hit-or-miss... if the rest of Windows is running smoothly then Dragon works well, but usually I don't have enough available memory to get really good virtualization performance in general.)

One interesting note: Before Dragon Dictate, before even Dragon Naturally Speaking had the Dragon brand name, there was dictation software from the same company on the Mac before it came to Windows.