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Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer
software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
technology
corporation A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and r ...
, headquartered in
Burlington, Massachusetts Burlington is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 26,377 at the 2020 census. History It is believed that Burlington takes its name from the English town of Bridlington, Yorkshire, but this has never b ...
, 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 Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and electronic document, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (ha ...
spin-off that was bought in 1999 by
Visioneer 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. Vision ...
, 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 Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
announced it would buy Nuance Communications. The deal is an all-cash transaction of $19.7 billion, including company debt, or $56 per share. The acquisition was completed in March 2022.


History

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 SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic d ...
. The resulting company adopted the Nuance name. During the prior decade, the two companies competed in the commercial large-scale speech application business.


ScanSoft origins

In 1974,
Raymond Kurzweil Raymond Kurzweil ( ; born February 12, 1948) 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 e ...
founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. to develop the first omni-font optical character-recognition systema computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. In 1980, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox."Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc."
''Smithsonian Speech Synthesis History Project (SSSHP) 1986–2002''
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 and software products, such as a sheetfed scanner called PaperMax and the document management software
PaperPort PaperPort is commercial document management software published by Kofax, used for working with scanned documents. It uses a built-in optical character recognition to create files in searchable Portable Document Format (PDF); text in these file ...
. 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. Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as TextBridge, PaperPort and
OmniPage OmniPage is an optical character recognition (OCR) application available from Kofax Incorporated. OmniPage was one of the first OCR programs to run on personal computers. It was developed in the late 1980s and sold by Caere Corporation, a company ...
. Beginning with the December 2001 acquisition of
Lernout & Hauspie Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, or L&H, was a Belgium-based speech recognition technology company, founded by Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie, that went bankrupt in 2001 because of a fraud engineered by the management. The company was based in Ypr ...
assets, the company moved into the speech recognition business and began to compete with Nuance. Lernout & Hauspie had acquired speech recognition company
Dragon Systems 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 ...
in June 2001, shortly before becoming bankrupt in October.


Partnership with Siri and Apple Inc.

In 2013, Nuance confirmed that its natural language processing algorithms supported
Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
's
Siri Siri ( ) is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and audioOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer questio ...
voice assistant.


Acquisition by Microsoft

On April 12, 2021,
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
announced that it will buy Nuance Communications for $19.7 billion, or $56 a share, a 22% increase over the previous closing price. Nuance's CEO, Mark Benjamin, will stay with the company. This will be Microsoft's second-biggest deal ever, after its purchase of
LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...
for $24 billion in 2016. Shortly after the deal, the
Competition and Markets Authority The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the competition regulator in United Kingdom. It is a non-ministerial government department in the United Kingdom, responsible for strengthening business competition and preventing and reducing anti-com ...
, a UK regulatory body, stated it was looking into the deal on the basis of antitrust concerns. In December 2021, it was reported that the deal would be approved by the
European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational political and economic union of member states that are located primarily in Europe. The union has a total area of and an estimated total population of about 447million. The EU has often been des ...
. The acquisition was completed on March 4, 2022.


References


External links

* {{Authority control, state=expanded Software companies based in Massachusetts Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq American companies established in 1992 Software companies established in 1992 1992 establishments in Massachusetts Companies based in Burlington, Massachusetts * Speaker recognition 2000 initial public offerings Software companies of the United States 2022 mergers and acquisitions Microsoft acquisitions Microsoft subsidiaries