Over the past few decades, speech recognition technologies have been consistently late from an expected availability perspective. This is despite recording equipment having been around for decades and Dictaphone being one of the pioneers of recording technology and becoming a trademarked name back in 1907.

Perhaps that situation is set to change as Nuance Communications emerges as a company heavily focused on recording and speech recognition technologies. It’s also buying up most of the other players in the market and seems determined to make its mark in this area. Nuance Communications was incorporated in 1992 as Visioneer, but following its merger with ScanSoft, a Xerox subsidiary, changed its name to the latter in 1999. It became Nuance Communications in 2005.