"Horrible customer service, company is staffed by morons that have no clue on how to process an order or even fill one, have called several times for tracking number yet they have no clue what I am talking about."

"RUN - do not walk - away from EVER doing business with Nuance! On 11/30/13, I ordered software called Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking 12 Premium for $99.99 (Item# N82E16832182201 online from Newegg.com (9997 Rose Hills Rd., Whittier, CA 90601-1701). The only reason I ordered it was that the combination of the sale price plus a $40 rebate from Nuance made it affordable; otherwise I would not have purchased it. After receiving the product, I mailed the rebate form, a copy of the sales receipt, and original UPC to Nuance on 12/6/13 and paid the USPS $5.60 for postal tracking. The USPS showed it was received by Nuance on 12/8/13. The rebate form said they would send the rebate within 8-10 weeks of the postmark of my request. After not receiving anything, I called them and they said they had no knowledge of anything. I sent a copy of everything to them and re-contacted them. I called Nuance at ***-***-**** on 1/22/14 @ 3:09 pm and spoke to a man with a Southeast Asian accent whose name was (phonetically) “Frizzle” as best as I could tell. He said to call the rebate number ***-***-**** which I called on 1/22/14 @ 3:15 pm and spoke with an American-sounding lady. “Chelsea” said that it was in pending status and was just keyed in in the last two days and that I would have it in 6-8 weeks from then. I have been emailing Nuance customer service on a regular basis asking where my rebate is. Each time they say it will be mailed the following week but it never is. Because I believe Newegg acted as an agent for Nuance, I asked them to use their marketing clout with Nuance to help me. They refused to help me but I believe they have some “skin in the game”. I would bet that if someone subpoenaed Nuance’s records, they may possibly find that they've received thousands of rebate requests but didn’t pay any of them (just my guess). Let’s face it, most people will either forget about it or get tired of being stonewalled by Nuance and Newegg and just give up. I don’t know how they can get away with this. Nuance Communications is at 1 Wayside Rd., Burlington, MA 01803. The rebate was mailed to Nuance Rebate, Offer# 13-79222, PO Box 540062, El Paso, TX 88554-0062. It is now almost 18 weeks. I have sent letters of complaint to the Attorneys General offices of my state and Mass. and Texas as well as the Departments of Consumer Protection of those three states. Finally, a seventh letter was sent to the USPS Inspector General's Mail Fraud Division. Last year Epson tried to screw me out of a $300 rebate in spite of my calling, emailing, and regular mailing the company president, customer service, and the rebate center on many occasions over many months. After the s*** hit the fan from these seven agencies, Epson phoned me to say the check was being overnighted by FedEx. In my opinion, consumer fraud and mail fraud are being committed by Nuance and their rebate center. If you Google Nuance and Rebates, you'll see many many instances of people who are being refused their rebates! Also, the last time I purchased something from them years ago, they kept calling me even though I told them to remove my number. The Caller Id showed them as "New Once"."

"BEWARE. I recently bought Nuance PDF Converter for $40 from buy.com (also called Rakuten.com) because there was a $40 rebate. The purchase date had to be Feb 3-Feb 9. I bought mine on February 7. The rebate was refused due to "invalid purchase date." The rebate page had NO contact information for Nuance, but I was able to get it from buy.com. When I called Nuance, I spoke to a nice enough sounding guy named Aaron who repeated that I bought it past the purchase date time period for the rebate. Luckily, I was prepared and had my invoice in front of me (as did he). He politely argued that they consider the SHIP date (2/11/14) the date of purchase. He relented without much of a fight, thankfully.

When I said that they're going to have a lot of angry customers with using the SHIP date for a 1-week purchase period, he said he would give them the rebate IF they called in "like you did" (his words).

This does not sound like an honest sales tactic to me. I think it was intentional rather than just a mistake. I would not advise buying a rebate item from Nuance."

"I was using v11 of the Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking software and upgraded to the new v12. The software once I downloaded it works fine. The only snag I ran into was in the download. I did not know that the purchase only had 5 download attempts and since their download site was so busy my sessions were timing out. After I called the sales support line in my emails they reset my account and asked if I could try later in the day which I did. I just wish I had know up front and I would not have wasted my time trying to restart the download."

"Company does not support products. When they repair a major problem that makes the software useless, they change the version number and then to get the fix you must buy the software again. This company is in the process of unloading Dragon Naturally Speaking Home version 11 & 11.5. This product has a known design defect that conflicts with Adobe Flash and Adobe Reader. Almost every web site uses some from of flash and about every computer used has an Adobe program on it. Nuance did fix the problem with their software and called it version 12, which they will sell you to fix the error that version 11.5 caused. So you end up buying the software twice to get a working copy. This company does not support it products and you will end up paying over and over for this software. "

"I'm working on a project to scan a couple thousand pages of documents, OCR them, then post the results in a searchable database online.

I started by searching for OCR software. I tried ABBYY Fine Reader, and it has some bugs that block my work. I tried Nuance's OmniPage Pro, and it worked fine. OCR software really must be used as a trial before it's purchased; all the software works differently, and the results will vary betwene products over different types of documents, scanners, and typefaces.

Downloading the trial from Nuance means you're purchasing the product; after 15 days from the download, you'll be billed. I wrote to Nuance to see if they'd send me a physical copy of the product, or if they'd expect that I just continued to use the download. They said they didn't support purchases over email, and that I'd need to call.

I spent 40 minutes on hold on Saturday before even talking to a rep. Once I did, he was happy to cancel my trial order and send a physical copy of the product.

Two days later, I received another purchase confirmation mail. Looking into my account at Nuance.com, I found that I had four orders: one for the trial offer, one for the physical copy I ordered, one that was cancelled for an upgrade I didn't order, and another one for the full price of the product, initiated by the order from the trial maturing.

When I called Nuance, the customer service agent was extremely rude. "These orders don't just come out of nowhere," he explained. Incredibly, he thought that I had placed four orders and was now calling to cancel them!

I'll now have to carry the charge for the two orders on my credit card until I can execute a "letter of software destruction" with Nuance, then have them refund my purcase. Since I don't have the software that I'll need to destroy, I'm not sure how that will work out -- but it'll be at least a couple of weeks before everything is corrected financially.

Worse yet, the trial has expired. Despite being billed twice and having these four orders, I don't have a license key for the software, and I have to put my project on hold until it arrives in the mail!

Nuance has apparently partnered with DigitalRiver to do their order handling. Online distribution of software is the way of the future, but DigitalRiver and Nuance have worked together to really screw it up. "