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Formerly | ScanSoft, Inc. |
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Type | Subsidiary |
Industry | Software |
Founded | 1992 as Visioneer |
Headquarters | Burlington, Massachusetts, U.S. |
Key people | Chairman and CEO Mark Benjamin |
Products | IVR,Natural Language Understanding,OCR, speech synthesis, speech recognition, PDF, consulting, government contracts |
Number of employees | 6,500+ (2021) |
Parent | Microsoft |
Website | www |
Nuance Communications, Inc. owned by Microsoft is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software.
Nuance merged with its competitor in the commercial large-scale speech application business, ScanSoft, in October 2005. ScanSoft was a Xerox spin-off that was bought in 1999 by Visioneer, a hardware and software scanner company, which adopted ScanSoft as the new merged company name. The original ScanSoft had its roots in Kurzweil Computer Products.
In April 2021, Microsoft announced it would buy Nuance Communications. The deal is an all-cash transaction of $19.7 billion, including company debt, or $56 per share. [1] The acquisition was completed in March 2022.
The company that would become Nuance was incorporated in 1992 as Visioneer. In 1999, Visioneer acquired ScanSoft, Inc. (SSFT), and the combined company became known as ScanSoft. In September 2005, ScanSoft Inc. acquired and merged with Nuance Communications, a natural language spinoff from SRI International. The resulting company adopted the Nuance name. During the prior decade, the two companies competed in the commercial large-scale speech application business. [2]
In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil founded 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. In 1980, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox. [3] The company became known as Xerox Imaging Systems (XIS), and later ScanSoft.[ citation needed ]
In March 1992, a new company called Visioneer, Inc. was founded to develop scanner hardware and software products, such as a sheetfed scanner called PaperMax [4] and the document management software 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 new company-wide name.[ citation needed ]
Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as TextBridge, [5] PaperPort and OmniPage. Beginning with the December 2001 acquisition of Lernout & Hauspie assets, the company moved into the speech recognition business and began to compete with Nuance. Lernout & Hauspie had acquired speech recognition company Dragon Systems in June 2001, shortly before becoming bankrupt in October. [6] [7] Scansoft acquired speech recognition company SpeechWorks in 2003. [8]
In 2013, Nuance confirmed that its natural language processing algorithms supported Apple's Siri voice assistant. [9]
In 2019, Nuance spun off its automotive division as the company Cerence, allowing it to focus on health care applications. [10]
On April 12, 2021, Microsoft announced that it will buy Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion, or $56 a share, a 22% increase over the previous closing price. [11] [12] Nuance's CEO, Mark Benjamin, stayed with the company. This was Microsoft's second-biggest acquisition up to that point, after its purchase of LinkedIn for $24 billion (~$26.9 billion in 2021) in 2016. [13] Shortly after the deal, the Competition and Markets Authority, a UK regulatory body, stated it was looking into the deal on the basis of antitrust concerns. [14] In December 2021, it was reported that the deal would be approved by the European Union. [15] The acquisition was completed on March 4, 2022. [16]
In May 2023, Nuance announced an unspecified number of layoffs. [10]
Raymond Kurzweil is an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist. He is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He has written books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism. Kurzweil is a public advocate for the futurist and transhumanist movements and gives public talks to share his optimistic outlook on life extension technologies and the future of nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology.
Xerox Holdings Corporation is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, though it is incorporated in New York with its largest population of employees based around Rochester, New York, the area in which the company was founded. The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010. As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scene photo or from subtitle text superimposed on an image.
Fujitsu Limited is a Japanese multinational information and communications technology equipment and services corporation, established in 1935 and headquartered in Tokyo. It is the world's sixth-largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the largest in Japan, in 2021. The hardware offerings from Fujitsu are mainly of personal and enterprise computing products, including x86, SPARC and mainframe compatible server products, although the corporation and its subsidiaries also offer a diversity of products and services in the areas of data storage, telecommunications, advanced microelectronics, and air conditioning. It has approximately 126,400 employees and its products and services are available in approximately 180 countries.
Dictaphone was an American company founded by Alexander Graham Bell that produced dictation machines. It is now a division of Nuance Communications, based in Burlington, Massachusetts.
Dell EMC is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other products and services that enable organizations to store, manage, protect, and analyze data. Dell EMC's target markets include large companies and small- and medium-sized businesses across various vertical markets. The company's stock was added to the New York Stock Exchange on April 6, 1986, and was also listed on the S&P 500 index.
SpeechWorks was a company founded in Boston in 1994 by speech recognition pioneer Mike Phillips and Bill O'Farrell. The Boston-based company developed and supported speech-related computer software. Originally known as Applied Language Technologies, SpeechWorks went public in 2000 and tripled its value. It was acquired by Scansoft in 2003. ScanSoft acquired Nuance in 2005, and changed its name to Nuance Communications.
MacSpeech, Inc. was a New Hampshire-based technology company that produced software-based speech recognition and voice dictation solutions for the Apple ecosystem. The company's products included iListen, MacSpeech Dictate, MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal, MacSpeech Dictate International, and MacSpeech Scribe. On February 12, 2010, Nuance Communications, Inc. acquired MacSpeech.
Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, which was acquired in turn by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, Nuance Communications, and Microsoft. It runs on Windows personal computers. Version 15, which supports 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, 8 and 10, was released in August 2016.
Motorola Solutions, Inc., is an American video equipment, telecommunications equipment, software, systems and services provider that succeeded Motorola, Inc., following the spinoff of the mobile phone division into Motorola Mobility in 2011. The company is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Kofax Inc. is an Irvine, California-based intelligent automation software provider. Founded in 1985, the company's software allows businesses to automate and improve business workflows by simplifying the handling of data and documents.
OmniPage is an optical character recognition (OCR) application available from Kofax Incorporated.
Platinum Technology Inc. was founded by Andrew Filipowski in 1987 to market and support deployment of database management software products and the applications enabled by database management technology and to render related services. Over its 12-year history, it was known for its acquisition of other companies, having bought more than 50 companies between 1994 and 1999 and growing to become the eighth largest global software company with revenue of a billion dollars per year. Acquisitions included Altai, Inc. (1995), AutoSystems Corporation, Brownstone Solutions, ICON Computing, Intervista Software, Software Interfaces, Locus Computing Corporation, LBMS (1998), Logic Works (1998), Protosoft, RELTECH Group, Memco Software, Softool, SQL TOOLS, Inc., Trinzic, Viatech and VREAM (1996). The company was a member of the UML Partners consortium.
Microsoft is a multinational computer technology corporation. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975, by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its current best-selling products are the Microsoft Windows operating system; Microsoft Office, a suite of productivity software; Xbox, a line of entertainment of games, music, and video; Bing, a line of search engines; and Microsoft Azure, a cloud services platform.
Visioneer, Inc. is a privately owned technology company based in Fremont, California, with offices in Canada and the Netherlands. Visioneer is a developer of intelligent document capture solutions, including hardware and software products. Visioneer is a Xerox licensee, licensed to build, sell and support stand-alone document scanners.
Broadcom Inc. is an American multinational designer, developer, manufacturer, and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wireless, storage, and industrial markets. As of 2022, some 78 percent of Broadcom's revenue was coming from its semiconductor-based products and 22 percent from its infrastructure software products and services.
Weidner Communications Inc. was founded by Stephen Weidner in 1977 and marketed the Weidner Multi-Lingual Word Processing System.
Genesys, or Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., is an American software company that sells customer experience (CX) and call center technology to mid-sized and large businesses. It sells both cloud-based and hybrid cloud software. The company was founded in 1990 and was acquired by investment firms Permira Funds and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) in February 2012.