TellMe cuts the cord to Nuance

TellMe just had their best quarter so far. It's taken them over two years to upgrade their platform to lose reliance on Nuance technology.

When TellMe was founded in 1999, they used speech recognition technology produced by the original Nuance. Over time, they upgraded their platform and continued to use Nuance technology even after ScanSoft bought out Nuance and changed it's name to Nuance. 

Now, TellMe has announced vast improvements to their platform, "the most substantial ... since Microsoft bought it in May 2007." and "the improvements ... take advantage of cloud computing..."

The article states that "The improvements  include speech recognition technology developed by other units of Microsoft." 

October 2007 Early Indications II: Ten big technology-related busts in the past ten years

Ever since at least 1997, Bill Gates has been predicting that speech recognition will be an integral aspect of the PC experience. In his 5-to-10-year timeframe, it never happened, but not for lack of trying: Dragon Systems, headquartered in the U.S., was losing money selling speech recognition software before it was bought by Belgian competitor Lernout & Hauspie in the spring of 2000, just after L&H paid $1 billion for Dictaphone. The Dragon founders, however, had the misfortune of watching their company go into reorganization after accounting irregularities made the L&H stock worthless.

ScanSoft, which made optical character recognition products, bought the assets, but even now, neither Nuance (as ScanSoft renamed itself) nor Microsoft has made speech interfaces work for general-purpose computing. In vertical domains, however, speech interfaces -- particularly telephonic customer service and medical transcription -- are working well.