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.
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