MacSpeech, Inc. was a

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec to the nor ...

-based technology company that produced software-based

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ...

and voice dictation solutions for the Apple ecosystem. The company's products included

iListen {{lowercase, iListen iListen, developed by MacSpeech, is a speech recognition program for the Apple Macintosh. In 2006, iListen was the only third-party software that allowed inputting text using one's voice that works on newer Macintosh models. I ...

MacSpeech Dictate 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 Medi ...

, MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal, MacSpeech Dictate International, and

MacSpeech Scribe MacSpeech Scribe is speech recognition software for Mac OS X designed specifically for transcription of recorded voice dictation. It runs on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The software transcribes dictation recorded by an individual speaker. Typically ...

. On February 12, 2010,

Nuance Communications Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its compe ...

, Inc. acquired MacSpeech.

History

The first commercial voice dictation product for

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

was IBM's

ViaVoice IBM ViaVoice was a range of language-specific continuous speech recognition software products offered by IBM. The current version is designed primarily for use in embedded devices. The latest stable version of IBM Via Voice was 9.0 and was able ...

, but

ScanSoft Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its compe ...

, the company that had exclusive global distribution rights to ViaVoice, merged with Nuance and stopped developing ViaVoice for Macintosh. (The first dictation software for Mac OS 9 was Articulate System's PowerSecretary.) Seeing a continued need for a Mac-based speech-to-text solution, MacSpeech was founded in 1996 by Andrew Taylor, a former employee of Articulate Systems experienced with software-based speech recognition technologies.

iListen

MacSpeech's first product,

, was developed in partnership with Philips Speech Processing using its "FreeSpeech 2000" speech engine. First released in 2000, by 2006 iListen was the only third-party software product that allowed voice-to-text input on the newer MacIntosh models requiring OSX. Its competitors at the time were

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...

's own speech recognition software (built into

); Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC by Nuance, running under a

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...

virtualization software In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

solution such as

Parallels Desktop for Mac Parallels Desktop for Mac is software providing hardware virtualization for Macintosh computers with Intel processors, and since version 16.5 also for Apple silicon-based Macintosh computers. It is developed by Parallels, since 2018 a subsidiary ...

VMware Fusion VMware Fusion is a software hypervisor developed by VMware for Mac computers. VMware Fusion allows Macs with Intel or the Apple M series of chips to run virtual machines with guest operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, or macOS, ...

; and the discontinued program

by Nuance/ IBM.

MacSpeech Dictate

In January 2008, iListen was discontinued, and replaced by "MacSpeech Dictate" (released February 15, 2008). The firm abandoned the Philips speech engine in favor of the speech-recognition engine Nuance used in its

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS) 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 ...

product for PC. MacSpeech Dictate was a winner of the MacWorld 2008 Best of Show award. In 2009, the firm released several editions of its products for the MacIntosh, including MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal and MacSpeech Dictate International. MacSpeech Dictate ran as a Mac-native application. It used the Dragon speech recognition engine (v9 or v10), licensed from

. This is the same technology that powers speech recognition in Dragon

NaturallySpeaking Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS) 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 ...

for the PC, although across platforms there are significant differences in features, functionality and integration. One major difference with MacSpeech Dictate was that it did not allow training by typing misrecognized words as Dragon NaturallySpeaking products do on Windows. Another notable difference was the lack of a transcription feature for recorded voice dictation, as found in NaturallySpeaking. MacSpeech released a separate product,

, to handle this. MacSpeech Dictate Medical, a version with specialized vocabularies for doctors and dentists, was released in June 2009. MacSpeech Dictate Legal, with specialized vocabulary for lawyers, was released in July 2009. MacSpeech Dictate International, with support for speech recognition in English, French, German and Italian, was released in September 2009. Localized versions of MacSpeech Dictate are available in German, French and Italian. It has never been available in Spanish. The original release used Dragon's v9 speech recognition engine. Version 1.5 was released in May 2009, and gained Microsoft Word integration, vocabulary editing features, and the Dragon v10 engine. Version 2.0 was released in September 2010, after the Dragon acquisition, and was renamed Dragon Dictate for Mac. Version 2 had the Dragon v11 engine, new voice commands for text editing, and a text-to-speech proofreading feature. MacSpeech Dictate 1.0 was reviewed by

David Pogue David Welch Pogue (born March 9, 1963) is an American technology and science writer and TV presenter. He is an Emmy-winning correspondent for ''CBS News Sunday Morning'' and author of the "Crowdwise" column in ''The New York Times'' Smarter Livi ...

of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', who said it filled a "big olein the Macintosh landscape", but criticized it as inferior to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.0 for Windows.

MacSpeech Scribe

MacSpeech Scribe is speech recognition software for Mac OS X designed specifically for transcription of recorded voice dictation. It runs on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The software transcribes dictation recorded by an individual speaker. Typically the speaker will have recorded their dictation using a digital recording device such as a handheld digital recorder, mobile smartphone (e.g. iPhone), or desktop or laptop computer with a suitable microphone. The program supports the audio file formats aif, .aiff, .wav, .mp4, .m4a, and .m4v.

Acquisition by Nuance

On February 12, 2010, MacSpeech, Inc. was acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc., and MacSpeech's products were incorporated into Nuance's Dragon NaturalSpeaking product line.

References

External links

MacSpeech Dictate Product Review

"The Long, Hard Haul for MacSpeech", article in The MacObserver

"History of MacSpeech" from MacSpeech company website

"Dragon® Professional Individual for Mac" from Nuance Communications

MacVoicesTV
{{DEFAULTSORT:Macspeech Nuance software Defunct software companies of the United States Speech recognition software