Nuance Go on Acquisition Run, Focus on Mobile
- From: "BlindNews Mailing List" <BlindNews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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- Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:46:06 -0400
Blog Nation (UK)
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Nuance Go on Acquisition Run, Focus on Mobile
By martyn davies
Nuance Communications, well known for automatic speech recognition and speech
synthesis software have acquired a whole series of companies this year to allow
diversification in mobile and vertical markets like healthcare. Nuance are
probably most famous for their domination in human speech technologies, both
desktop speech dictation systems and enhanced IVR (Interactive Voice Response)
systems. When last I looked at the stats, they had hoovered up about 70% of
this marketplace by virtue of combining the "big two" Nuance and Scansoft into
one company.
On the mobile front, Nuance bought two interesting companies back in August,
namely Tegic and VoiceSignal. At the Symbian Smartphone Show last week, they
were displaying the logos from both of these companies, and showing some of the
technology. Tegic are the company responsible for T9, the predictive text
system used on many mobile phones. One year ago Nuance held a competition where
Ben Cook, the World's fastest texter, took on a speech recognition system to
see who could send text faster from a mobile. The Nuance speech recognizer won
the competition, but evidently Nuance were sufficiently impressed with T9 that
they decided to buy-in the technology.
VoiceSignal have embedded speech technology that can be found inside handsets
from Blackberry and Palm today, which contrasts with the centralized,
server-based recognition systems Nuance are famous for. VoiceSignal also power
mobile phone technology for the visually impaired, such as the ability to speak
the text from a mobile screen so that you know where you are in the menus.
It's clear that Nuance are interested in developing their portfolio of wireless
solutions, and in particular solving the problem of how mobile users send text
messages, given that the majority of mobile phones don't have a QWERTY
keyboard. Actually even those that do have full keyboards today are often too
small to enter text at any speed (e.g. the Palm Treo or Nokia E61), or just
plain slow, for example the iPhone. Certainly "alternative input" technologies
are likely to be a growing area as we expect more and more from our cellphone
experience.
http://uk.blognation.com/2007/10/24/nuance-go-on-acquisition-run-focus-on-mobile/
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