As you’ve probably heard, M&A in the Speech Recognition space continue, providing good insights into what’s happening in our industry.
Om Malik had an interesting analysis about some of the things regarding the Microsoft Tellme deal. Considering the $800M price tag, it makes it the 4th largest acquisition in the history of Microsoft.
On the other hand, Wallstrip recently did a little piece on Nuance talking about its strategy, recent acquisitions such as BeVocal, and it’s future, in particular in the speech dictation space with Dragon Dictate… pretty funny too.
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March 15th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
om says that nuance will get license and royalties from microsoft/tellme so good for nuance here
March 21st, 2007 at 3:23 pm
On the other hand though, this much consolidation is certainly going to hurt new advances in the technology. In the past, Nuance and SpeechWorks were in a continuous race to beat each other, which led to great advances in the Speech Recognition Industry.
But with less and much bigger players, they won’t be able to react as fast as they used to, and will not have the same motivation to keep pushing the envelope…
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Hey there.
TellMe does use Nuance’s recognizer, although there won’t be additional license revenues to Nuance unless TellMe expands their data center or upgrades to the upcoming Nuance Recognizer 9. There’s been some speculation that Microsoft will convert TellMe’s infrastructure to the MS recognizer. That will take a while and be expensive, but we’ve seen that MS will spend money where they think it’s important to get market share.
Nuance is not the only recognizer game in town. BBN, IBM, and Microsoft have their own offerings, and deep pockets. There are also a few minor players. I would expect these companies to make improvements in their offerings, as platform companies like Intervoice, Cisco, Genesys, etc. investigate diversifying their platforms.
Todd
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Oh, and Dragon Dictate became Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 years ago.
Todd
April 9th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
[…] This makes things really interesting considering Microsoft recently acquired Local Voice Search capabilities as well through the acquisition of Tellme. […]