Nuance Communications, the company behind the Dragon speech recognition products, has purchased MacSpeech and its Mac OS X-based speech recognition applications.

MacSpeech began using Dragon technology in 2008, so Mac users are already familiar with the speech recognition engine's performance. With the purchase of the MacSpeech company, however, Nuance will gain control over how Mac-based speech recognition products are developed.

Despite Nuance's history as a Windows product developer, the company is already somewhat familiar with coding for Apple products. Nuance has already released Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search as iPhone apps, and both seem to be popular downloads at Apple's App Store.

"We are excited to become part of the Nuance team and accelerate our ability to deliver great speech solutions to the Mac community," commented MacSpeech president Andrew Taylor.

Nuance hasn't offered any details about what it plans to do with the MacSpeech name, but did commit to continuing to develop Mac-specific products.

Peter Mahoney, Nuance Communication's senior vice president and general manager for Dragon, said "MacSpeech's knowledge of the Mac platform and its deep understanding of Mac users, coupled with our decades-long experience with speech recognition and the popular Dragon brand, will allow us to provide the world's best dictation technology in a solution that is 100-percent Mac."