Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications is a computer software technology company. Their worldwide headquarters is in Peabody, Massachusetts in the United States. Nuance is known mainly for its speech recognition and speech synthesis software that power some of the world's largest automated telephone applications. Previously, the company focused mainly on desktop productivity software, like desktop dictation and imaging software. The company was known until October 2005 as ScanSoft, and before 1999 as Visioneer. Desktop software products in the company's portfolio include its desktop voice-recognition software Dragon Naturally Speaking (formerly Dragon Dictate), the optical character recognition software OmniPage and various other desktop and enterprise speech and imaging technologies.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

File:Nuance-Communications-logo.gif
Company type	Public (NASDAQ: SSFT)
Industry	Productivity applications
Founded	1992 as Visioneer
Headquarters	Burlington, USA
Key people	Chairman & CEO: Paul Ricci
Products	OCR, speech synthesis, speech recognition, PDF
Revenue	$175 million
Number of employees	1100
Website	www.nuance.com

Company history

The company was founded in 1992 as Visioneer, Inc. It changed its name to ScanSoft in 1999. Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as OmniPage.

Acquisitions

• Mar. 2000 – Caere Corp., of Los Gatos, California – $145 million

Starting in 2001, ScanSoft entered the speech and telephony markets with a series of acquisitions of companies in the speech recognition and synthesis space.

• Dec. 2001 – Lernout & Hauspie, of Merelbeke, Belgium, Speech and Language division – $39.5 million

This acquisition occurred following Lernout & Hauspie's bankruptcy proceedings. Previously, Lernout & Hauspie had acquired speech technology companies BBS, Centigram Communications Corporation, FDC, Dragon Systems (in 2000) and Kurzweil AI (in 1998).

• Oct. 2002 – Phillips Speech Processing – $35.4 million

Phillips had previously acquired Voice Control Systems, which had in turn had acquired Pure Speech, Scott Instruments and VPC.

• Aug. 2003 – SpeechWorks, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts, – $132 million

SpeechWorks had previously acquired both Eloquent Technologies, Inc., of Ithaca, New York in 2000 for $17 million and T-Nexit.

• Jan. 2004 – LocusDialog
• May. 2004 – Telelogue
• Nov. 2004 – Phonetic Systems, Ltd. – $35 million
• Nov. 2004 – ART Advanced Recognition Technologies – $21.5 million
• Nov. 2004 – Rhetorical Systems Ltd., of Scotland – $6.7 million
• Sep. 2005 – Nuance Communications, of Menlo Park, California – $221 million

The entire company renamed itself Nuance Communications on October 18 2005. Nuance is publicly traded (Nasdaq: SSFT).

Consumer products

• PaperPort
• Omnipage
• Dragon Naturally Speaking
• Systran Translator (Distribution Agreement in Europe with Systran)
• PDF Creator

External links

• Official company news