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

UPDATE: Microsoft has announced the acquisition this morning (March 14). 

The Wall Street Journal refreshed the rumor mill today that Microsoft was once again approaching TellMe. This iteration of the rumor mill puts an $800 million price tag on TellMe's book of business.  read more »

Does the acquisition of BeVocal strengthen or dilute the Nuance brand? It all comes down to this: is speech a solution or an enabling technology?  read more »

Today, on the second day of the SpeechTek conference, Nuance announced its acquisition of BeVocal (see press release here).

Though some see this acquisition as a big thumbs up from the speech recognition juggernaut, I see another finger being raised to its existing hosting partners.  read more »

Typically, when a company goes through a big acquisition, you end up with either a hybrid hyphenated name or a new name all together - or the acquired company just gets enveloped in the new parent's name:

De-Branding

• Genesys + VoiceGenie = Genesys
• Verizon + MCI = Verizon
• Intervoice + Edify = Intervoice

Hyphenated names:

• Alcatel + Lucent = Alcatel-Lucent
• St. Paul Insurance + Travelers = St. Paul Travelers Group

New Names:  read more »