Getting access to that big customer base is a key goal of the Microsoft acquisition. It turns out, that’s not necessarily a business.” But helping medical facilities and call centers save money by operating more efficiently is, Croen observes. “They publish papers, and they announce the results of their speech recognition accuracy.

“Microsoft has already been a very front-running technology developer - their labs and their people are world class,” Croen says. After Croen’s company was acquired, the chief executive of that “new Nuance,” Paul Ricci, continued to focus on applying the company’s technology to actual business problems - like freeing brokers from looking up stock quotes or enabling doctors to dictate their notes from a patient visit - as opposed to honing technology for technology’s sake. One of Nuance’s first customers under Croen’s leadership was the brokerage Charles Schwab, which enabled its customers to call up a phone number, say a ticker symbol or mutual fund name, and get an instant quote. But turning those lab breakthroughs into marketplace products “has never been obvious to the Microsofts or the IBMs,” says Croen. For decades, Croen says, companies like Microsoft and IBM have poured millions of dollars into trying to get software to better recognize human speech. Croen formed that company in 1994 with three researchers from SRI International, a nonprofit research and development group. Ron Croen was chief executive of the Silicon Valley company, Nuance, that gave the Massachusetts Nuance its name in 2005.

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