Nokia Picks Nuance For Speech Recognition And More; Will Open Up Technologies To Developers

Nokia is signing a multi-year deal worth "tens of millions of dollars" with Nuance Communications in an unusual arrangement, where Nokia will not only license Nuance's speech-recognition and predictive text technologies to use internally, but also to make them available to developers working with Nokia. Michael Thompson, GM for Nuance's mobile business unit, said in an interview that the deal is being called "the Open Interface Framework," however declined to give many specifics about the program, including when it would launch and whether developers would have to pay a fee to participate. [click heading for more]