Nuance Communications
Photograph by tillweon Flickr.
This investigation is focused upon medical communications transcription services. . For a decade prior to that, the two Nuance Communications companies competed in the commercial large-scale speech application business. In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil founded the Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc.
The officially-termed merger was a Telecommunications network de facto acquisition of Nuance by ScanSoft, though the combined company changed its name to Nuance following the transaction. The company became known Nuance Communications 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.
Before 1999, ScanSoft was known as Visioneer, a hardware and software scanner company. to develop the first omni-font optical character Nuance Communications recognition system — a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font.
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. Prior to the 2005 merger, ScanSoft acquired other companies to expand its business. Before the merger, the two companies competed in the commercial large scale speech application business.
The company also maintains a small division which does software and system development for military and government agencies. As of 2008, the company is a result of organic growth, mergers, and acquisitions. After the merge, the company continued to grow through acquisition. The acquisition of Philips Speech Recognition Systems sparked an antitrust investigation by the US Department of Justice .
Visioneer eventually sold its hardware division to Primax Electronics, Ltd. The original ScanSoft had its roots in Kurzweil Computer Products, a software company that developed the first omni-font character recognition system. In September 2005, ScanSoft Inc.
Beginning with the December 2001 acquisition of Lernout & Hauspie, the company moved into the speech recognition business and began to compete with Nuance. Nuance was founded in 1994 as a spinoff of SRI International s Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory. in January 1999.
acquired and merged with Nuance Communications, and the resulting company adopted the Nuance name. Two months later, in March, Visioneer acquired ScanSoft from Xerox to form a new public company with ScanSoft as the company name. Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as TextBridge, PaperPort and OmniPage.
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. In 1999, Visioneer bought ScanSoft — a Xerox spin-off — and adopted ScanSoft as the company name.
Most notable was the merger of ScanSoft and Nuance in October 2005. Nuance s products were computer telephony applications, Voice XML (VXML), SIP services, and automated call steering.
Based in Menlo Park, California, Nuance deployed their first commercial large-scale speech application in 1996.
