"Say the name of the person or department you want to reach." SpeechWorks printed that line inside the cover of its prospectus, with a caller's one-word answer: "Sales." It sounds ordinary now. In 2000 it was a leap past press-one-for-billing menus. The Boston company sold software that let airlines, brokers and banks answer the phone with a computer that understood spoken words, so callers could book tickets or trade funds just by talking.

Teaching Phones to Listen

SpeechWorks was incorporated in Massachusetts in May 1994, with Michael Phillips as co-founder and chief technology officer. Its SpeechWorks 6 platform gave companies the recognition engine, tools and design help to build voice services in several languages. Phone lines were noisy and callers mumbled, so the company paired its software with teams that wrote and tuned each conversation. The bet was that businesses would trade expensive call-center staff for software that never put anyone on hold.

From Nasdaq to Nuance

SpeechWorks priced its offering at $20 a share on August 1, 2000, and listed on Nasdaq as SPWX. It arrived as the dot-com crash was spreading, and buyers of new software pulled back. Revenue kept growing, but losses persisted. In 2003 ScanSoft, the company behind the old Xerox scanning software, bought SpeechWorks in an all-stock deal. ScanSoft later took the name Nuance Communications, and Microsoft bought Nuance in 2022.

Cover: The Parrot, Mary Cassatt. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a parrot (a machine that talks back).