MacSpeech, Inc. was a

New Hampshire New Hampshire ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...

-based technology company that produced software-based

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also ...

and voice dictation solutions for the Apple ecosystem. The company's products included iListen,

MacSpeech Dictate MacSpeech, Inc. was a New Hampshire-based technology company that produced software-based speech recognition and voice dictation solutions for the Apple ecosystem. The company's products included iListen, MacSpeech Dictate, MacSpeech Dictate Med ...

, MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal, MacSpeech Dictate International, and MacSpeech Scribe. On February 12, 2010,

Nuance Communications Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its comp ...

, Inc. acquired MacSpeech.

History

The first commercial voice dictation product for

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

was

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

's ViaVoice, but

ScanSoft Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its compe ...

, 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.) Seeing a continued need for a Mac-based speech-to-text solution, MacSpeech was founded in 1996 by Andrew Taylor, a former employee of Articulate Systems experienced with software-based speech recognition technologies.

iListen

MacSpeech's first product, iListen, was developed in partnership with Philips Speech Processing using its "FreeSpeech 2000" speech engine. First released in 2000, by 2006 iListen was the only third-party software product that allowed voice-to-text input on the newer MacIntosh models requiring OSX. Its competitors at the time were

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

's own speech recognition software (built into

); Dragon Naturally Speaking for PC by Nuance, running under a

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

virtualization software In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s with ...

solution such as Parallels Desktop for Mac or

VMware Fusion VMware Fusion is a software hypervisor developed by VMware for macOS systems. It allows Macs with Intel or Apple M series CPUs to run virtual machines with guest operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, or macOS, within the host m ...

; and the discontinued program ViaVoice by Nuance/

MacSpeech Dictate

In January 2008, iListen was discontinued, and replaced by "MacSpeech Dictate" (released February 15, 2008). The firm abandoned the Philips speech engine in favor of the speech-recognition engine Nuance used in its

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Dragon NaturallySpeaking (also known as Dragon for PC, or DNS) is a speech recognition software package developed by Dragon Systems of Newton, Massachusetts, which was acquired in turn by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, Nuance Communication ...

product for PC. MacSpeech Dictate was a winner of the MacWorld 2008 Best of Show award. In 2009, the firm released several editions of its products for the MacIntosh, including MacSpeech Dictate Medical, MacSpeech Dictate Legal and MacSpeech Dictate International. MacSpeech Dictate ran as a Mac-native application. It used the Dragon speech recognition engine (v9 or v10), licensed from

. This is the same technology that powers speech recognition in Dragon NaturallySpeaking for the PC, although across platforms there are significant differences in features, functionality and integration. One major difference with MacSpeech Dictate was that it did not allow training by typing misrecognized words as Dragon NaturallySpeaking products do on Windows. Another notable difference was the lack of a transcription feature for recorded voice dictation, as found in NaturallySpeaking. MacSpeech released a separate product, MacSpeech Scribe, to handle this. MacSpeech Dictate Medical, a version with specialized vocabularies for doctors and dentists, was released in June 2009. MacSpeech Dictate Legal, with specialized vocabulary for lawyers, was released in July 2009. MacSpeech Dictate International, with support for speech recognition in English, French, German and Italian, was released in September 2009. Localized versions of MacSpeech Dictate are available in German, French and Italian. It has never been available in Spanish. The original release used Dragon's v9 speech recognition engine. Version 1.5 was released in May 2009, and gained Microsoft Word integration, vocabulary editing features, and the Dragon v10 engine. Version 2.0 was released in September 2010, after the Dragon acquisition, and was renamed Dragon Dictate for Mac. Version 2 had the Dragon v11 engine, new voice commands for text editing, and a text-to-speech proofreading feature. MacSpeech Dictate 1.0 was reviewed by

David Pogue David Welch Pogue (born March 9, 1963) is an American technology and science writer and TV presenter, and correspondent for ''CBS News Sunday Morning''. He has hosted 18 ''Nova'' specials on PBS, including '' Nova ScienceNow'', the ''Making Stu ...

of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'', who said it filled a "big

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in the Macintosh landscape", but criticized it as inferior to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.0 for Windows.

MacSpeech Scribe

MacSpeech Scribe is speech recognition software for Mac OS X designed specifically for transcription of recorded voice dictation. It runs on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The software transcribes dictation recorded by an individual speaker. Typically the speaker will have recorded their dictation using a digital recording device such as a handheld digital recorder, mobile smartphone (e.g. iPhone), or desktop or laptop computer with a suitable microphone. The program supports the audio file formats aif, .aiff, .wav, .mp4, .m4a, and .m4v.

Acquisition by Nuance

On February 12, 2010, MacSpeech, Inc. was acquired by Nuance Communications, Inc., and MacSpeech's products were incorporated into Nuance's Dragon NaturalSpeaking product line.

References

External links

MacSpeech Dictate Product Review

"The Long, Hard Haul for MacSpeech", article in The MacObserver

"History of MacSpeech" from MacSpeech company website

"Dragon® Professional Individual for Mac" from Nuance Communications

MacVoicesTV
{{DEFAULTSORT:Macspeech Nuance software Defunct software companies of the United States Speech recognition software