Scansoft Acquires Dragon NaturallySpeaking
For those of us who have followed the saga of Dragon, it comes as a huge relief that ScanSoft (www.ScanSoft.com), a trusted name in OCR software, has purchased the Dragon speech and language assets of Lernout & Hauspie.
© 2002
For those of us who have followed the saga of Dragon, it comes as a huge relief that ScanSoft (www.ScanSoft.com), a trusted name in OCR software, has purchased the Dragon speech and language assets of Lernout & Hauspie.
Background: As many of you know, Dragon was an independent company for over 15 years until Lernout & Hauspie purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking in the summer of 2000. There were at least two very positive outcomes that came out of this unlikely marriage --
1. Lernout & Hauspie was a big supporter of Business Education and donated nearly $200,000 worth of its award-winning software to Business Education teacher training programs in over 30 states. The first states received Voice Xpress 5. When Dragon 5 became available, this product was donated instead. (Rumor has it that the donation program will continue for the remaining states.)
2. Many of the Natural Language Technology (NLT) features pioneered in Voice Xpress have found their way into Dragon NaturallySpeaking.
Despite these positives, the downside of the L & H acquisition of Dragon was inescapable. Shortly after the Dragon takeover, the principal figures of Lernout & Hauspie were found guilty in the Netherlands of misrepresenting earnings and defrauding investors. This threw Lernout & Hauspie into bankruptcy. Unable to climb out of their difficulties, the company was sold off bit by bit.
Fortunately, for all the wonderful employees at the old Lernout & Hauspie and Dragon Systems in the United States, ScanSoft has taken over. The Dragon speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies were acquired for 10 million in cash, a $3.5 million note, and $7.4 million of ScanSoft stock. Most of the L&H/Dragon employees that have been so very supportive of Business Education in the past have been retained by ScanSoft.
ScanSoft is a natural fit for Dragon. OCR, speech recognition, handwriting recognition, and text-to-speech have a lot in common. These technologies comprise four of the new input/output technologies required by the new Digital Communications Tools course, the new secondary Business Education curriculum being designed in Washington State in alignment with the new NBEA Input Technology standards.
In the midst of an all of the difficulties, the Dragon engineers kept NatSpeak 6 on schedule and produced an outstanding new product. Thankfully, the financial crisis is over and the speech recognition revolution can now continue at full steam.