Nuance to Acquire VoiceSignal

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Nuance to Acquire VoiceSignal

Tue, 05/15/2007 - 15:41 — Avery

Nuance Communications announced the acquisition of long time rival VoiceSignal today, giving the speech juggernaut a lock on device based speech recognition.

The deal, valued at $293 million, knocks out Nuance's chief competitor for embedded speech recognition. Embedded speech recognition refers to lightweight engines that allow speech processing to occur on the mobile phone (or other device) instead of those which require processing to happen on a more specliaized server over the network. VoiceSignal had made strides in using their engine technology for searching on mobile devices (find a song, get upcoming meetings, voice dialing) and voice entry of text messages.

The acquisition can be a rocky one, as VoiceSignal and Nuance have been locked in legal entanglements with eachother on more than one occasion. However, if the Nuance/ScanSoft merger shows the market anything, if there's a company who has successfully integrated diametrically opposed corporate cultures - it's them.

The significant remaining players in the space are now Microsoft (Microsoft Smartphone/PDAs only) and IBM.

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Tue, 05/22/2007 - 22:31 — daniel

Nuance continues down the M&A path

VoiceSignal had the majority of market share in the embedded voice activated dialing and search space. This acquisition helps position Nuance even stronger in the mobile search and carrier market (Nuance recently also acquired BeVocal). Nuance has passed the point of no return in terms of positioning themselves as the SPEECH RECOGNITION company (the spate of acquisitions over the last 5 years are testament to this). Within the next 3-5 years the market we'll be able to see if this strategy worked. Overall, I think it was a good acquisition for Nuance and makes the company more attractive in the Communications market as the dividing lines between embedded and network-based speech reco blur.