Nuance Adds To Speech Recognition War Chest; Buys MacSpeech

Nuance Communications

Nuance Communication’s depth of speech-recognition technology is already vast, but after getting a peak at what Google (NSDQ: GOOG) was working on last night at Mobile World Congress, it’s not surprising that it feels it needs more.

The Burlington, Mass.-based company has acquired MacSpeech, a provider of speech recognition solutions for Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) computers. Release. The deal will allow Nuance to extend its Dragon NaturallySpeaking products to Mac users as an application. Previously, MacSpeech was licensing the Dragon dictation technology to deliver MacSpeech Dictate. Together, the two can move faster to market, which includes the iPhone. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Recently, Nuance launched Dragon Dictation on the iPhone, which was well received by users who were looking for a faster way to input information into the device. The field has seen a lot of progress over the past few years with Google recently rolling out a lot of voice-dictation services on its Android OS. Last night at Mobile World Congress during CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote, demonstrations were given of German speech recognition and talked about how one day live speech could be translated form one language to another.

Nuance has previously purchased the makers of T9 text input and Jott Networks. It is currently trading at about $14.53 a share.

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