Nuance acquires MacSpeech
Nuance Communications, the company behind Dragon Dictate and Dragon Search for the iPhone, has acquired MacSpeech, the company that makes MacSpeech Dictate and other voice recognition apps for the Mac platform.The first product from MacSpeech was iListen, which was available until 2008. At that time it was the only speech recognition app that could provide dictation services for the Mac after IBM discontinued ViaVoice. iListen was replaced with MacSpeech Dictate, and the company licensed the Dragon recognition engine created by Nuance for the program. MacSpeeech Dictate was a big improvement over iListen, but it still wasn't as powerful or as full-featured as the Dragon versions running on the Windows Platform.
That's all going to change.
Last week I talked with Peter Mahoney, a Senior Vice President at Nuance, who told me the acquisition of MacSpeech will speed up the flow of new features to MacSpeech Dictate. At some point the program will acquire the Dragon name. Mahoney told me we can expect to see a macro scripting language, integrated support for digital recorders, and accuracy improvements.
Nuance made a big splash on the iPhone platform with Dragon Dictate [iTunes link] and Dragon Search [iTunes link]. Nuance also provided the speech recognition for Siri [iTunes link], which has received rave reviews.
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Source: http://www.nuance.com/
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Nuance Communications, the company behind Dragon Dictate and Dragon Search for the iPhone, has acquired MacSpeech, the company that makes...
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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.
February 16 2010 at 2:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyThis 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.
February 16 2010 at 1:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyDoes 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.
February 16 2010 at 11:07 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyApparently Macspeech wasn't much, if any, better.
February 16 2010 at 12:08 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI 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.)
February 16 2010 at 8:54 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI'm with you! As soon as they bring the price down to match the Windows version, I'll buy it. Until then, NO SALE.
February 16 2010 at 6:36 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyOne 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.
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