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| Type | Public (NASDAQ: NUAN) |
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| 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 multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA, that provides speech and imaging applications. Current business products focus on server & embedded speech recognition, telephone call steering systems, automated telephone directory services, medical transcription software & systems, optical character recognition software, and desktop imaging software.
As of 2008, the company is a result of organic growth, mergers, and acquisitions. Most notable was the "merger" of ScanSoft and Nuance in October 2005. Before the merge the two companies competed in the commercial large scale speech application business. 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, a hardware and software scanner company. In 1999, Visioneer bought ScanSoft — a Xerox spin-off — and adopted ScanSoft as the company name. The original ScanSoft had its roots in Kurzweil Computer Products, a software company that developed the first omni-font character recognition system.
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Company history
In September 2005, ScanSoft Inc. acquired and merged with Nuance Communications, and the resulting company adopted the Nuance name. For a decade prior to that, the two companies competed in the commercial large-scale speech application business.
ScanSoft history (origins)
In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil founded the Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. to develop the first omni-font optical character recognition system — a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font.1 In 1980, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox.2 The company became known as Xerox Imaging Systems (XIS), and later ScanSoft.
In March 1992, a new company called Visioneer, Inc was founded to develop scanner hardware & software products, such as PaperPort. Visioneer eventually sold its hardware division to Primax Electronics, Ltd. in January 1999. Two months later, in March, Visioneer acquired ScanSoft from Xerox to form a new public company with ScanSoft as the company name.
- 1974 — Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc founded to develop the first omni-font optical character recognition system
- 1980 — Xerox buys Kurzweil Computer Products and runs it as Xerox Imaging Systems (XIS), and later ScanSoft.
- Mar. 1992 — Visioneer, Inc founded to develop scanner hardware & software products.
- Jan. 1999 — Visioneer sold its hardware division to Primax Electronics, Ltd.
- Mar. 1999 — Visioneer acquired ScanSoft from Xerox and adopts ScanSoft as new company-wide name.
Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as TextBridge[1], PaperPort and OmniPage. Beginning with the December 2001 acquisition of Lernout & Hauspie, the company moved into the speech recognition business and began to compete with Nuance.
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. Based in Menlo Park, CA, Nuance deployed their first commercial large-scale speech application in 1996. 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.
- 1994 — Nuance spun off from SRI's STAR Lab
- 1996 — Nuance deployed its first commercial speech application
- (Description/chronology of Nuance's actual speech product offerings needed!)
Acquisitions
Prior to the 2005 merger, ScanSoft acquired other companies to expand its business. Unlike ScanSoft, Nuance did not actively acquire companies prior to their merger. After the merge, the company continued to grow through acquisition.
ScanSoft acquisitions prior to the merger
- 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
ScanSoft merges with Nuance; changes company-wide name to Nuance
- September 15, 2005 — ScanSoft acquired and merged with Nuance Communications, of Menlo Park, California — $221 million
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 2007 — Focus Infomatics, Inc. Woburn, Massachusetts.
- 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 — $265 million.
- September 28, 2007 — Commissure, Inc.[2] of New York City, New York — 217,975 shares of common stock.
- November 2, 2007 — Vocada, Inc.[3] of Dallas, Texas.
- November 26, 2007 — Viecore, Inc. of Mahwah, New Jersey.
- May 21, 2008 — eScription, Inc.[4] of Needham, MA — $340 million plus 1,294,844 shares of common stock. 3
- October 1, 2008 — Royal Philips Electronics' speech recognition unit Philips Speech Recognition Systems of Vienna, Austria for about 66 million euros, or $96.1 million.
- October 3, 2008 — SNAPin[5] of Bellevue, WA — $180 million in shares of common stock.
Additionally
- August 14, 2008 Nuance publicly announced an unsolicited proposal to acquire Zi Corporation[6] of Calgary, Canada for $0.80 per share in cash ($40.4 million). On August 15, Zi declined to to enter into negotiations with Nuance.
Consumer products
- PaperPort
- OmniPage
- Dragon NaturallySpeaking
- PDF Converter [7]
- ETI-Eloquence and RealSpeak speech engines.
Business Products & Services
- Medical Transcription
- Speech Recognition Engine
- Call Steering [8]
- Automated Directory Assistance
- Caller Authentication [9]
- SmartListener [10]
- Employee Productivity Suite - Automated Password Reset, Auto Attendant, Emergency Event Notification, Employee Internal Dialer [11]
- Outbound Care Solutions [12]
- Enterprise Services for Call Centers [13]
- Embedded Speech Recognition
- Text to Speech
- Voice Authentication
- Embedded Text Input (T9 and XT9)
- Embedded Text-based Mobile Search (T9 Nav)
Competitors
- IBM WebSphere Voice Server[14][15]
- Acapela Group
- Loquendo[16]
- Microsoft Speech Server[17]
- SVOX Text-to-speech solutions [18]
- Vorero (Asahi Kasei) [19]
References
- ^ "KURZWEIL COMPUTER PRODUCTS, INC." Smithsonian Speech Synthesis History Project (SSSHP) 1986 - 2002
- ^ "KURZWEIL COMPUTER PRODUCTS, INC." Smithsonian Speech Synthesis History Project (SSSHP) 1986 - 2002
- ^ Nuance to acquire SNAPin
See also
External links
