Nuance buys voice-to-text messaging company SpinVox

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 31 December 2009 00:52

IT Industry - Strategy

Speech recognition specialist Nuance has acquired SpinVox, the UK company that provides the voice-to-text messaging facility for mobile service providers worldwide, including Telstra and Optus.

The deal values SpinVox at approximately $US102.5 million. Nuance has paid $US66 million in cash and 2.3 million Nuance shares valued at $US36.5 million. The sale follows numerous reports late last year that SpinVox was struggling financially, cutting costs and laying off staff.

Nuance said that by integrating SpinVox's carrier services with its own speech recognition platform, it hoped to accelerate the growth of its voice-to-text business and scale to meet the needs of a growing, global customer base.

"As the estimated number of operational voicemail boxes in the world has passed one billion, and consumer and corporate activity now generate over 150 billion voicemails a year, Nuance and SpinVox have experienced strong interest in voice-to-text automation," Nuance said. "The two companies helped pioneer solutions that utilise speech recognition and transcription workflow solutions to convert voicemails into text that can be sent to users as SMS or email messages."

SpinVox has come in for a deal of bad press over revelations that it uses human operators to transcribe speech that its automated system is unable to recognise. SpinVox has acknowledged that this is the case, but has never revealed the extent of human intervention. However it has claimed that this has decreased as its systems 'learn' from these human operators.

Whatever the extent of this human involvement, if Nuance is able to bring its considerable experience and expertise to bear and reduce this, it wil significantly improve the finances of the SpinVox operation. Furthermore Nuance should be able to provide much needed investment to improve the responsiveness of the SpinVox service. When iTWire tested the recently launched Optus version there was a delay of about 15 minutes between transmission of the voice message and receipt as a text message - a lag that might well deter many potential customers from taking up the service.

Nuance said that it would use the SpinVox acquisition to expand its operations and accelerate growth in three key areas: service quality, global reach and innovation.

"The combination of SpinVox's global infrastructure with Nuance's proven speech recognition technology provides robust, carrier-grade voice-to-text services with outstanding quality, ISO security certification, and highly-scaled production systems...[that] will achieve the broadest language support in the industry, including English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese...The acquisition creates a voice-to-text platform – comprising full and partial speech automation, Web services integration and advanced features – that is state-of-the-art today, and offers customers and partners the assurance of technological leadership through its robust product and services roadmap."


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