Scansoft
 |
|
| Public | |
| Traded as | NASDAQ: NUAN |
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 1992 as Visioneer |
| Headquarters | Burlington, Massachusetts, United States |
|
Key people
|
Chairman and CEO: Paul Ricci Executive Vice President: Bruce Bowden |
| Products | Productivity applications, OCR, speech synthesis, speech recognition, PDF, consulting, government contracts |
| Revenue |
 $1.949 Billion (2016) |
|
$0.139 Billion (2016) |
|
|
-$0.013 Billion (2016) |
|
| Total assets |
$5.7 Billion (2016) |
| Total equity |
 $1.9 Billion (2016) |
|
Number of employees
|
13,500 (2016) |
| Website | www |
Nuance Communications is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, United States on the outskirts of Boston, that provides speech and imaging applications. Current business products focus on server and embedded speech recognition, telephone call steering systems, automated telephone directory services, medical transcription software and systems, optical character recognition software, and desktop imaging software. The company also maintains a small division which does software and system development for military and government agencies.
Nuance merged with its competitor in the commercial large-scale speech application business, ScanSoft, in October 2005. ScanSoft was a Xerox spin-off that was bought in 1999 by Visioneer, a hardware and software scanner company, which adopted ScanSoft as the new merged company name. The original ScanSoft had its roots in Kurzweil Computer Products, a software company that developed the first omni-font character recognition system.
In September 2005, ScanSoft Inc. acquired and merged with Nuance Communications, and the resulting company adopted the Nuance name. For a decade prior to that, the two companies competed in the commercial large-scale speech application business.
In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil founded the Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. to develop the first omni-font optical character-recognition system—a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. In 1980, Kurzweil sold his company to Xerox. The company became known as Xerox Imaging Systems (XIS), and later ScanSoft.
In March 1992, a new company called Visioneer, Inc. was founded to develop scanner hardware and software products, such as a sheetfed scanner called PaperMax and the document management software PaperPort. Visioneer eventually sold its hardware division to Primax Electronics, Ltd. in January 1999. Two months later, in March, Visioneer acquired ScanSoft from Xerox to form a new public company with ScanSoft as the new company-wide name.
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Wikipedia