Nuance Communications
More info
- Owner
- Microsoft (from 2022)
- Type
- Speech recognition
The American company behind Dragon dictation, which for two decades was close to synonymous with commercial speech recognition.
The company is really ScanSoft, which bought up most of the speech industry: Dragon NaturallySpeaking in 2001, rival Nuance in 2005 — whose name it took — and a long tail of smaller players. The result was a near-monopoly on dictation, voice-driven phone menus and in-car voice commands.
When Apple launched Siri in 2011, it was an open secret that the recognition came from Nuance. Its most profitable niche ended up being medical dictation, and that is what Microsoft paid roughly $19.7 billion for in 2022. By then deep learning had already turned much of the old technology into a commodity.