MacSpeech - History

History

The first commercial voice dictation product for Mac OS X was IBM's ViaVoice, but ScanSoft, the company that had exclusive global distribution rights to ViaVoice, merged with Nuance and stopped developing ViaVoice for Macintosh. (The first dictation software for Mac OS 9 was Articulate System's PowerSecretary.)

MacSpeech was established in 1996 by current CEO Andrew Taylor, a former employee of Articulate Systems, which was acquired by Dragon Systems. MacSpeech was the only company that developed voice dictation systems for the Macintosh. Its full product line was devoted to speech recognition and dictation. On September 20, 2010, Nuance corporation, the maker of MacSpeech, announced a new product, Dragon Dictate for Mac, based on Nuance's superior NaturallySpeaking for Windows product. Nuance is expected to promptly announce whether Dragon Dictate for Mac allows training by typing misrecognized words, as NaturallySpeaking now does, but MacSpeech does not.

Dictate began shipping to existing iListen customers in mid-February, 2008

At the 2008 MacWorld Expo, MacSpeech's newly-revealed Dictate was a winner of the MacWorld 2008 Best of Show award.

Also in 2008, its previous flagship product, iListen, was replaced by MacSpeech Dictate, built around Nuance's licensed Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine. During 2009, MacSpeech released several editions of their speech recognition products for the Macintosh, including MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal and MacSpeech Dictate International. MacSpeech Dictate has been localized with native-language speech recognition support in French, Italian, and German. On 12 February 2010, MacSpeech released MacSpeech Scribe which performs transcription of recorded dictation. On 16 February 2010, MacSpeech was acquired by Nuance Communications, for the PC and speech recognition apps for the iPhone and iPad. Dragon Dictate for Mac, an upgrade for MacSpeech, was announced on September 20, 2010, by Nuance corporation. The upgrade incorporates some of the benefits of NaturallySpeaking for Windows into the Mac Software. Other NaturallySpeaking features, such as training mis-recognized words by simply re-typing them using the keyboard, are not present in Dragon Dictate for Mac.

In addition to Taylor, those involved from the beginning until the Nuance acquisition included, Chief-Evangelist Chuck Rogers, CFO (later, VP) Michael Schwing, VP of Engineering Jeff Ganyard, early hands-on investors including Micah Solomon, and VP of Marketing Donald MacCormick.