Nuance Communications
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| Nuance Communications, Inc. | |
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| Type | Public (NASDAQ: NUAN) |
| Founded | 1992 as Visioneer |
| Headquarters | Burlington, Massachusetts, USA |
| Key people | Chairman & CEO: Paul Ricci |
| Industry | Productivity applications |
| Products | OCR, speech synthesis, speech recognition, PDF |
| Revenue | $613 million (FY2007) |
| Employees | 3500 |
| Website | www.nuance.com |
Nuance Communications is a computer software technology company that provides speech and imaging solutions, and is headquarterd in Burlington, Massachusetts in the United States.
In October 2005, Nuance "merged" with ScanSoft, a company that focused on desktop productivity software, including desktop dictation and imaging software, but had grown through acquisition to become an enterprise speech solutions company, and a direct competitor of Nuance. The officially-termed 'merger' was a de facto acquisition of Nuance by ScanSoft, though the combined company changed its name to Nuance following the transaction. Before 1999, ScanSoft was known as Visioneer, where it was a spin-off of Xerox.
Desktop software products that Nuance inherited from ScanSoft's portfolio included desktop voice-recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking (formerly Dragon Dictate), optical character recognition software OmniPage, which was acquired from Caere, Inc., document management software PaperPort (the original product of Visioneer), and various other imaging technologies. Starting in 2001, ScanSoft entered the speech and telephony markets with a series of acquisitions of companies in the speech recognition and synthesis space, buying companies like SpeechWorks that, before the Nuance-ScanSoft merger, competed in Nuance's core market of enterprise business solutions. Current business products leverage technology developed out of both Nuance's pre-merger offerings and ScanSoft's post-2001 acquisitions, focusing on Server & Embedded Speech Recognition, Telephone call steering systems, automated telephone directory services, Medical Transcription software & systems, and other voice related technologies.
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[edit] Company history
In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil started the company Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc.[1] In 1980, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox.[2] The company became known as Xerox Imaging Systems (XIS), and later ScanSoft.[3] The core technology used in the XIS/ScanSoft products was developed from Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. In 1999, Visioneer, Inc. split and sold its hardware and software companies. The hardware division was sold to Primax Electronics, Ltd. The software division merged with XIS/ScanSoft to form a new public company known as ScanSoft.
[edit] Nuance history prior to the 2005 merger with ScanSoft
Nuance was founded in 1994 as a spinoff of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)'s Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory, and thus existed concurrently with ScanSoft for the decade prior to their 2005 merger. Based in Menlo Park, CA, Nuance deployed their first commercial large-scale speech application in 1996, a market ScanSoft entered in 2001 through a series of acquisitions. Because of Nuance and ScanSoft's decade-long co-existence, and particularly that they competed in the same market for several years prior to their merger, each company's history should be considered separate up until September 2005. Nuance's products were computer telephony applications, Voice XML (VXML), SIP services, and automated call steering. Deployed in call centers and the like, Nuance applications ran on WindowsNT-based and Solaris operating systems, and commonly relied on Dialogic boards for the telephony hardware. Unlike ScanSoft, Nuance did not actively acquire companies prior to their merger.
- 1994 — Nuance spun off from SRI's STAR Lab
- 1996 — Nuance deploys its first commercial speech application
- (Description/chronology of Nuance's actual speech product offerings needed!)
[edit] ScanSoft history (origins)
Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as TextBridge[1], PaperPort and OmniPage.
- Mar. 1992 — ScanSoft founded in 1992 as Visioneer, Inc. Visioneer developed scanner hardware & software products, such as PaperPort.
- Jan. 1999 — Visioneer sold to Primax Electronics, Ltd.
- Mar. 1999 — Visioneer acquires ScanSoft (originally known as Kurzweil Computer Products) from Xerox Corporation; adopts ScanSoft as new company-wide name.
[edit] ScanSoft acquisitions prior to the 2005 merger with Nuance
- Mar. 2000 — Caere Corp., of Los Gatos, California — $145 million. Caere had developed OmniPage (scanner and OCR software.)
- December 2001 — Lernout & Hauspie, of Ieper, Belgium, Speech and Language division — $39.5 million
- This acquisition occurred following Lernout & Hauspie's bankruptcy proceedings. Previously, Lernout & Hauspie had acquired these speech technology companies: BBS, Berkeley Speech Technologies (1996), Centigram Communications Corporation, Dragon Systems (2000), FDC, and Kurzweil Applied Intelligence (1998).
- January 30, 2003 — Royal Philips Electronics Speech Processing Telephony and Voice Control, Dialogue Systems — $35.4 million
- Philips had previously acquired Voice Control Systems, which had in turn had acquired Pure Speech, Scott Instruments and VPC.
- August 11, 2003 — SpeechWorks, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts, — $132 million
- SpeechWorks' major products were speech recognition and synthesis systems, which were later merged with Nuance's speech product line. It had previously acquired Eloquent Technologies, Inc., of Ithaca, New York in 2000 for $17 million and T-Netix.
- January 2004 — LocusDialog, of Montreal, Quebec
- May 2004 — Telelogue, Inc., of Iselin, New Jersey
- November 2004 — ART Advanced Recognition Technologies, Ltd., of Tel Aviv, Israel – $21.5 million
- November 2004 — Rhetorical Systems Ltd., of Scotland — $6.7 million
- May. 2005 — MedRemote Inc., of Westmont, Illinois — $6.2 million
- February 1, 2005 — Phonetic Systems, Ltd., of Burlington, Massachusetts and Israel — $35 million
[edit] ScanSoft merges with Nuance; changes company-wide name to Nuance
- September 15, 2005 — Nuance Communications, of Menlo Park, California — $221 million
[edit] Nuance acquisitions after merger
- March 31, 2006 — Dictaphone Corporation, of Stratford, Connecticut — $357 million.
- December 29, 2006 — Mobile Voice Control, Inc. of Mason, Ohio.
- March 26, 2007 — Bluestar Resources Ltd.
- April 24, 2007 — BeVocal, Inc. of Mountain View, California — $140 million.
- August 24, 2007 — VoiceSignal Technologies, Inc. of Woburn, Massachusetts.
- August 24, 2007 — Tegic Communications, Inc. of Seattle, Washington.
- September 28, 2007 — Commissure, Inc. of New York City, New York — 217,975 shares of common stock.
- November 2, 2007 — Vocada, Inc. of Dallas, Texas.
- November 26, 2007 — Viecore, Inc. of Mahwah, New Jersey.
- May 21, 2008 — eScription, Inc. of Needham, MA — $340 million plus 1,294,844 shares of common stock.
[edit] Consumer products
- PaperPort
- OmniPage
- Dragon NaturallySpeaking
- PDF Converter
- ETI-Eloquence and RealSpeak speech engines.
[edit] Business Products & Services
- Medical Transcription
- Speech Recognition Engine
- Call Steering
- Automated Directory Assistance.
- Embedded Speech Recognition
- Text to Speech
- Voice Authentication
- Embedded Text Input (T9 and XT9)
- Embedded Text-based Mobile Search (T9 Nav)
[edit] Competitors
- IBM WebSphere Voice Server[2][3]
- Loquendo[4]
- Microsoft Speech Server[5]
- SVOX Text-to-speech solutions [6]
- Vorero (Asahi Kasei) [7]
[edit] Notes
- ^ "KURZWEIL COMPUTER PRODUCTS, INC." Smithsonian Speech Synthesis History Project (SSSHP) 1986 - 2002
- ^ "KURZWEIL COMPUTER PRODUCTS, INC." Smithsonian Speech Synthesis History Project (SSSHP) 1986 - 2002
- ^ "Scansoft Inc 10-K For 1/3/99 EX-10.13" Securities Information from the SEC EDGAR database for sophisticated business professionals
