One of the big disappointments when I first made the move to Mac, was the fact that Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking was not available unless I ran a virtual Windows PC on it. There was a voice recognition solution available, MacSpeech iListen, but it was rather poor substitute. A short time later MacSpeech released a new product, MacSpeech Dictate. It used the same voice to text engine as Dragon and as a result was far more accurate. A year later they released version 1.5, and it was even better; I no longer missed using Dragon. Then last week I posted a first look at MacSpeech Scribe. It too used Nuance’s voice-to-text engine in order to work its magic. In fact, it seems like Nuance’s technology is everywhere. Then they released Dragon Dictation for iPhone, powered the new iPhone app Siri, and recently bought Jott and SpinVox. It is for all thes reasons that I wasn’t surprised to hear that…

…Nuance has just acquired MacSpeech too! As Nuance’s VP Peter Mahoney explains…

I’m so excited to share with you that this morning we announced that Nuance has acquired MacSpeech, the leader in providing speech recognition solutions for the Macintosh. Upon its introduction in 2008, MacSpeech Dictate earned the coveted MacWorld Best of Show Award, and has since received praise from press and customers alike for its accuracy. As you are already know, Dictate uses our Dragon speech recognition engine at its core, which is part of what makes it so popular!
This is an exciting time for the Mac community — Mac shipments are up, the new iPad is due to ship in a couple of months, and new apps (like Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search) are being added to the App Store every day, revolutionizing how we work, play and communicate. It’s a perfect time for us to open Dragon’s doors to the Mac community!
I’m sure that folks will have a lot of questions about what today’s news means for Dragon and for Dictate. Rest assured, if you currently use either product, nothing will change in the near term. In the coming weeks, we promise to share updates with you as regularly as possible. On this page, you’ll find a copy of the press release that was issued this morning, as well as a detailed Q&A, and links to important resources.
We are thrilled to welcome MacSpeech to the Nuance family and we look forward to sharing more updates with you in the coming months.
Thanks,
Peter Mahoney
Senior Vice President and General Manager, Dragon

I’m excited, too. Voice Recognition on the Mac was lousy until Nuance got involved. This acquisition means that Nuance is fully committed to OS X and that development will move forward full steam. And the fact that Mahoney mentions the iPad in his announcement… that makes me super excited for what is to come.

We’ll have more news about what this means for voice recognition as a whole as it becomes available.