About MacSpeech
From its inception, MacSpeech has always believed speech should be ubiquitous on the Macintosh. This vision originates with the company’s founder, CEO, and the Chief Architect, Andrew Taylor.
Andy’s mild demeanor belies the persistence of his vision and his talents as a engineer. He has designed and implemented computer software and hardware solutions for clients in communications, imaging, speech synthesis and recognition. Before founding MacSpeech, he helped design and build the industry’s very first dictation system, Power Secretary, for Articulate Systems (which was later acquired by Dragon).
In late 1996, Andy observed speech recognition on the Macintosh platform was falling far behind that of Windows. Starting with investments from friends and relatives, MacSpeech was incorporated in 1997. It completed its first round of seed money financing by selling T-shirts for $99 each. Every T-shirt came with a serial number — making each one unique. But there was no promise of success, only the promise that if MacSpeech did succeed as a company, these T-Shirt owners — the “Founders” as they were called — would receive version 1.0 of a speech recognition product for free.
Having raised its seed capital, MacSpeech produced its first “proof of concept” product, ListenDo!, which allowed people to use Apple’s built-in PlainTalk speech recognition in new ways, implementing additional commands and providing an organizational tool lacking in Apple’s implementation.
MacSpeech, always a Mac-only developer, attracted the interests of an investor group who provided the angel funding necessary to take MacSpeech to the next level, and release its first ever dictation product for the Mac platform. In July 1999, at Macworld Expo in New York, MacSpeech stunned the Macintosh community by giving away free preview release copies of iListen 1.0. For the first time, Macintosh users could speak to their Macs in a normal, natural voice and have their words appear on the screen. With that nascent release, the Macintosh world was forever changed.
Around this time, Apple courted companies, including IBM, to recommit to the Macintosh platform. IBM’s only consumer software product at the time was a speech recognition application called ViaVoice, and its entry into the market provided formidable competition for the fledgling MacSpeech. While MacSpeech “beat” IBM to market with ListenDo! and its free preview edition of iListen, ViaVoice Millennium Edition 1.0 came to market months before iListen 1.0 in November of 2000.
The two companies shared the Macintosh speech recognition market for several years, each owning about 50% of the market. Both companies continued to introduce new versions of their respective products, including versions for Apple’s Mac OS X operating system, and both iListen and ViaVoice were sold in Apple’s retail stores.
In April 2003, IBM announced it would no longer compete in the consumer speech recognition market for either Windows or Macintosh. This made Dragon the only company producing a speech recognition product for Windows, and MacSpeech the sole provider of speech recognition solutions for Macintosh. Since then, MacSpeech has continued to improve its technology and product, and the company has shown impressive, consistent year-over-year growth. Indeed, in 2006 the company doubled its sales volume from the preceding year.
Its latest speech recognition product, MacSpeech Dictate, was released in February 2008. Upon its introduction at Macworld Expo 2008, MacSpeech Dictate promptly earned the coveted Macworld Best of Show Award, the first of the accolades the product would garner from consumers and press alike. Through it all, MacSpeech remains steadfast to its original vision: Speech should be ubiquitous on the Macintosh. Explore MacSpeech Dictate for yourself and the manner in which it seamlessly integrates into your workflow, and we’re sure you’ll agree. With MacSpeech products, you just think it, speak it, and create it.
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