Apple invested in developing its own systems, Amazon pursued its Alexa voice assistant, and Google followed quickly with its Home Assistant. It was fast, hands-free, and-compared with the keyboard and mouse-a much more natural way for humans to communicate.īig Tech started plowing big money and talent into this opportunity. Voice recognition was no longer just about dictating text but about shopping, searching for information, selecting music and video entertainment, controlling appliances, and much more.

Nuance wasn’t the only one to realize that voice was poised to become a prime channel for human interaction with computers and cloud services. Nuance’s revenues grew to $1.7 billion in 2013.īut this growth was short-lived. In 2011, Apple introduced Siri, which was based on Nuance technology. Nuance grew rapidly, both by signing up these major customers and also through millions of individual consumers who purchased the iPhone app, which became the number-one business productivity application in the iTunes store. Once Apple validated the product, Samsung and all the other phone manufacturers wanted it. Nuance used this technology in an app called Dragon Dictation, which Apple featured when it introduced the iPhone 3GS at its 2009 Worldwide Developers Conference. As computers became more powerful, Nuance was able to develop a major innovation: “large vocabulary continuous speech recognition.” Now you could say anything about any topic, and the technology could accurately transcribe it in real time.

Systems recognized only limited vocabularies, though they nevertheless proved useful in narrow commercial applications such as telephone customer support centers and transcription of medical records.īy the late 2000s, things had changed. Before the two merged in 2005, speech recognition was constrained by computer processing power. Nuance began in 1994 as a spinoff from SRI, a Stanford laboratory that had developed speech-recognition technology for the US government.

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