Both companies used same recognition engine

Nuance on Wednesday announced that it has acquired MacSpeech, the company behind the speech recognition software Dictate. The move will eventually bring Nuance's NaturallySpeaking software to the Mac platform as a native application, rather than requiring users to run the software via Boot Camp or a virtualization utility.

Although MacSpeech offered a Mac-based alternative to NaturallySpeaking, it was essentially based on the same speech recognition engine due to a licensing agreement between both companies. Despite the common engine, the Mac software arguably provided a limited feature set and relatively high price compared to its Windows counterpart.

"We have heard from our customers—and from the Mac community at large—for years that they want Dragon for the Mac environment," said Nuance senior vice president Peter Mahoney. "MacSpeech's knowledge of the Mac platform and its deep understanding of Mac users, coupled with our decades-long experience with speech recognition and the popular Dragon brand, will allow us to provide the world’s best dictation technology in a solution that is 100-percent Mac."

Additional information regarding NaturallySpeaking for Mac has yet to be announced. [via Ars Technica]

by MacNN Staff