Nuance Communications is a computer Software technology company. Their worldwide headquarters is in Peabody, Massachusetts in the United States. Nuance is known mainly for its speech recognition and speech synthesis software that power some of the world s largest automated telephone applications. Previously, the company focused mainly on desktop productivity software, like desktop dictation and imaging software. The company was known until October 2005 as ScanSoft, and before 1999 as Visioneer. Desktop software products in the company s portfolio include its desktop voice-recognition software Dragon Naturally Speaking (formerly Dragon Dictate), the optical character recognition software OmniPage and various other desktop and enterprise speech and imaging technologies.

The company has been in the news after 13 R&D engineers from the Menlo Park and Montreal offices defected to Yahoo!.

=Company history=

The company was founded in 1992 as Visioneer, Inc. It changed its name to ScanSoft in 1999. Prior to 2001, ScanSoft focused primarily on desktop imaging software such as OmniPage.

==Acquisitions==

Starting in 2001, ScanSoft entered the speech and telephony markets with a series of acquisitions of companies in the speech recognition and synthesis space.

This acquisition occurred following Lernout & Hauspie s bankruptcy proceedings. Previously, Lernout & Hauspie had acquired speech technology companies BBS, Centigram Communications Corporation, FDC, Dragon Systems (in 2000) and Kurzweil AI (in 1998).

Phillips had previously acquired Voice Control Systems, which had in turn had acquired Pure Speech, Scott Instruments and VPC.

SpeechWorks had previously acquired both Eloquent Technologies, Inc., of Ithaca, New York in 2000 for $17 million and T-Netix.

The entire company renamed itself Nuance Communications on October 18 2005. Nuance is publicly traded (Nasdaq: SSFT).

=Consumer products=

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