I can't understand why Apple hasn't bought them already... Like Steve always said, "Own the technology."
While speech recognition forms the backbone of Nuance... its business is really in health care, enterprise, document and imaging, and automative/embedded. Nuance is a lot larger and deeper than most people realize - they are not just a speech recognition company.
They have not really benefited from the advances in mobile processing. For example, their voice recognition for Siri does not use the iPhone's processor--it uploads the speech and utilizes offline processing. No internet connection and Siri becomes deaf and mute (aside from the few "I'm sorry..." phrases). Personally I think Apple would be better off without Nuance for Siri.
Google, on the other hand, has had huge advances in speech recognition. It recognizes on-the-fly, and will fallback to full on-device recognition if there is no net connection. It also seems better at understanding speech--especially when you see it correct itself as you speak (as it better understands the context of what you are saying).
Nuance does have hybrid ASR/TTS engines, but I guess Apple decided not to deploy it. Saying that, cloud based ASR/TTS is far superior to any onboard system ... a large grammar set can gobble up a huge chunk of RAM, and the processing required is still hefty.
Most things I see people complaining about "Nuance" is not the technology itself... but the implementation. Now who is to blame for the implementation - Apple, Nuance? Who knows...
How much baggage? I'm asking seriously as I don't know the exact specifics on the company aside from their commercial dictation software. Regardless, Apple has plenty of cash, why not do what Google did with "Nest" (and "beats"), buy it but allow the company to run independently yet "overseen" by Apple?
Huge baggage ... Speech recognition forms the core of Nuance, but its business is in Health Care, Enterprise (i.e. Apple), Document and Imaging, and Automative/Consumer Electronics. If Apple were to buy Nuance, what would they do with 85% of the company? No one would buy these piecemeal unless it came with access to the speech recognition technology.
Samsung or IBM would make logical suitors for Nuance ... both companies have a large and deep enough portfolio for each and every part of the company to fit in. Apple or even Google would be an awkward fit.
No computer has ever recognized my voice well. In a quiet room. Congrats on being understood by Siri. Not everyone is.
Normal sentence structure and proper grammar may help?