My "speech article" seeking 'bots didn't even catch the press release announcing that Kirusa has acquired the intellectual property assets of HeyAnita. It is a fact, though. As usual, the financial terms are undisclosed. Oh well, another one bites the dust... just when the notion of a speech enabled portal is gaining legs again.

HeyAnita was one of the originals. I'd put Tellme and BeVocal as the others in the category in North America. There were more - mostly telco sponsored ones in Western Europe (TIM, for instance is going strong in Italy) and around the globe.HeyAnita didn't hew closely to the portal path. Like many pragmatic voice processing pioneers at the time, it relied on morphing between being a provider of canned apps, hosted speech resource, tool maker and wireless application host. It also had premises based solutions (like Plums Portal) and just to make sure that something it sells might be relevant to enterprise customers, "HeyAnita provided software developers with tools and services to build and deploy custom voice applications utilizing the HeyAnita FreeSpeech™ platform" (quoting the press release).

 
As for Kirusa, after years in the multimodal and desert, it has found a home in the wireless messaging business. Speech to SMS is demonstrably popular (potentially). And it is one of the first companies to showcase a live, up-and-running X+V-based application. So let's watch for some of that spunky, HeyAnita! spirit to emanate from Kirusa's marketspace.