Nuance's SpinVox acquisition set to boost voice-to-text messaging

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 31 December 2009 11:05

IT Industry - Strategy

The acquisition of voice-to-text messaging service provider by global speech technology leader Nuance could herald a rapid uptake in the technology across mobile operators and in unified messaging systems and other applications.


Nuance announced earlier today that it had acquired SpinVox http://www.itwire.com/content/view/30279/127/ - a company widely reported to have been struggling financially - for $US106.5m. However SpinVox has been successful in getting its service adopted by a number of operators, including Telstra and Optus, and by Skype.

Nuance's financial clout alone should be sufficient to give the SpinVox product a significant boost. Nuance has boasted 40 percent compound annual growth in revenues every year since 2001 and expects to pass the $US1 billion threshold in 2009. It claims cash and securities reserves in excess of $US400m.

John Pollard, Nuance's VP of voice to text services, told iTWire "We think [voice-to-text] technology is a critical component of a variety of unified communications scenarios, not just voicemail-to text but call completion scenarios and eventually presence aware unified communication where the network will decide whether to turn the voice communication into a voice-to-text communication or start an IM session.

"The core ability to convert voice to text makes all these happen and we believe it is a really promising space across a lot of different scenarios: enterprise, mobile, business and consumer."

Nuance has its own voice-to-text messaging service, Nuance Mobile, in competition to the SpinVox offering. It was launched in April 2008 but despite being a much smaller company SpinVox has managed to establish a strong market presence.

Peter Chidiac, managing director Nuance ANZ, told iTWire that SpinVox was the exclusive provider in the Asia- Pacific region, while Nuance had customers only in North America (Nuance announced just a month ago that AT&T had signed up).

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