Businessweek

Nuance Communications, Inc. provides voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers worldwide. The company’s solutions are used in healthcare, mobile, consumer, enterprise customer service, and imaging markets. The company’s solutions are based on proprietary voice and language platform and are used every day by people and businesses for tasks and services, such as requesting information from a phone-based self-service solution, dictating medical records, searching the mobile Web by voice, entering a destination into a navigation system, or working with PDF documents. It markets and sells products, through an e-commerce Website and also through a network of resellers, including system integrators, independent software vendors, value-added resellers, hardware vendors, telecommunications carriers and distributors. Segments The company’s activities are divided in four segments: Healthcare, Mobile and Consumer, Enterprise, and Imaging. Healthcare The Healthcare segment provides comprehensive dictation and transcription solutions and services that capture the patient encounters with their physician. These hosted and on-premise solutions provide platforms to generate and distribute clinical documentation through the use of advanced dictation and transcription features, and allow the company to deliver medical transcription solutions. Additionally, it offers solutions that utilize the captured information and coding, compliance and record management, which streamlines Healthcare Information Management (HIM) processes to drive compliance and reimbursement. Through Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI) programs, the company assists in bridging the gap between physicians and coders. Direct distribution is supplemented by distributors and partnerships with electronic medical records application and other healthcare IT providers, including Allscripts, Cerner, Epic, GE, IBM, McKesson and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). Its customers include Advocate, Banner Health, Cleveland Clinic, Department of Veterans Affairs, HCA, Leahy Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, NHS, Providence Health & Services, Sharp, Steward Sutter Health, Tenet, UPMC, U.S. Army, and Wellspan. Mobile and Consumer The company helps consumers use the capabilities of their phones, cars, tablets, desktop and portable computers, personal navigation devices and other consumer electronics by enabling the use of voice commands, text-to-speech and enhanced text input solutions to control and interact with these devices, and to access the array of content and services available on the Internet. Its suite of Dragon general purpose desktop and portable computer dictation applications increases productivity by using speech to create documents, streamline repetitive and complex tasks, input data, complete forms and automate manual transcription processes. The company’s portfolio of mobile and consumer solutions and services includes an integrated suite of voice control and text-to-speech solutions, dictation applications, predictive text technologies, mobile messaging services and emerging services such as dictation, Web search and voicemail-to-text. Its solutions are used by mobile phone, automotive, personal navigation device, computer, television and other consumer electronic manufacturers and their suppliers, including Amazon, Apple, Audi, BMW, Ford, Garmin, GM, HTC, Intel, LG Electronics, Mercedes Benz, Nintendo, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp, T-Mobile, TomTom and Toyota. The company’s connected mobile services are sold through telecommunications carriers, voicemail system providers, smartphone application developers or directly to consumers, and generally priced on a volume of usage model (such as per subscriber or per use). Its connected services customers and partners include Cisco, Comcast, Esnatech, Mitel, Rogers, Siemens, Telefonica, Telstra, Time Warner Cable, TISA, T-Mobile and Vodafone. In addition, various smartphone application stores include applications that utilize its technology, such as Dragon Mobile Assistant, DragonDictation, DragonGo!