Nuance buys Zi in $35m deal

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Voice recognition company Nuance Communications Inc has finally won over the management of Zi Corp who have agreed to a cash and stock deal worth around $35 million.
Nuance has been trying to buy its Calgary, Canada-based rival for more than six months, and back in July the company had offered $47.5 million for the developer of text input technologies for mobiles.
The declining market means the final value still represents a 73% premium on the closing price of Zi's stock on Wednesday.
In a statement, Nuance said that Zi’s mobile search and text input systems complement its own portfolio and would help it better address the market need for text input technology, especially in Asia-Pacific.

Nuance acquires parts of IBM's speech technology

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Nuance recently announced that it will be purchasing some of IBM's speech technology. While the addition of IBM's source code will enable Nuance to make improvements to its embedded and network-based speech recognition technology, the acquisition and ensuing relationship has prompted questions over Nuance's technology and IBM's motives.

Nuance recently announced that it has acquired parts of IBM's speech recognition technology; namely, the source code from IBM's research and development team, which will enhance its speech capabilities in the areas of network-based and embedded text-to-speech (TTS), and advanced speech recognition (ASR). Nuance intends to combine the source code with its own over the next two years to improve the performance of its speech recognition engine.

Despite initial speculation that IBM will no longer compete in this market, the company will continue to develop its speech capabilities independently in these areas. It has sold Nuance a past release of its code for its embedded ViaVoice software and its WebSphere Voice Server middleware. The key motive for IBM in making this transaction is to gain some return on investment for its speech recognition technology, which is not unusual as it regularly sells patent licenses to other vendors.

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Speech recognition slashes turnaround times for HCA's radiology reports

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HCA International, a central London healthcare facility has rolled-out speech recognition-based radiology reporting on 12 sites. The technology has reduced average report creation times to 2:40 minutes from 24 hours previously. Adoption levels among radiologists surpassed the initial goal of 60% by the end of the project: with two-thirds of the roll-out complete, more than 96% of the dictations are already processed through speech recognition. [click heading for more]

It’s like software understands, um, language

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EU researchers have taken speech recognition to a whole new level by creating software that can understand spontaneous language. It will, like, make human-machine interaction, um, work a lot more, er, smoothly.
Automated speech recognition has revolutionised customer relations for banks, allowing them to respond quickly and with less staff to more low-level queries. It has helped to enable online banking and the development of more advanced private and public services because machines can handle routine matters, leaving people to take care of more serious issues.
But this technology has its limits. The most common, very basic, voice system asks a series of questions or offers a series of options, slowly and fitfully narrowing down your problem or supplying the solution. It would be nice to just tell the service what you want.
Soon, you can, thanks to the work of the Luna project, a European-wide effort to dramatically advance the power and intelligence of speech recognition. The team is moving the system from utterances – like ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘account’ – to spontaneous speech, such as ‘I want to get the balance on my current account.’ [click heading for more]

 

Voice recognition will kill 118 service

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VOICE RECOGNITION specialist, Nuance, is predicting the end for premium rate directory assistance services. Especially, it sees the likes of the moustached 118 118 service in Britain, for example, going down the Swanee.The reason is quite simple. Nuance has a complete range of products which will entirely dispense with the need for human-powered interactive directory services.
The company can already claim to have handled half a billion automated directory enquiries in 2008 which have utilised Nuance technology..
Typically, Nuance powered directory services use voice recognition to guide callers to their ultimate objective. The service normally only needs to ask the caller three questions before providing the appropriate telephone number.
Nuance actually claims - almost certainly correctly - that the majority of UK directory enquiries calls which aren't free are placed by corporate employees who don't give a fig about the cost.
When the corporate money dries up, it argues, such employees will be faced with paying for directory searches. There are several ways out of this dilemma.
The most significant option will be to place search technology onto mobile phoneswhich can look through an on-device addressbook and then go out onto the Net to obtain a number.
Rather than requiring the handset's user to key in text, the software will utilise speech recognition to create the search string. [click heading for more]

Hosted IVR Services Offer Tremendous Growth Potential in Markets Across EMEA According to Frost & Sullivan

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"The hosted model makes it easier for enterprises to deploy speech applications, bringing together the best of both worlds – the business benefits of the software as a service (SaaS) model, and improving the customer experience by making IVR's more user-friendly," explains Frost & Sullivan Research Director Ashwin Iyer.New analysis from Frost & Sullivan (contactcenter.frost.com), EMEA Hosted IVR Services Markets, predicts this market to be one of the largest and fastest growing markets for contact center technologies in EMEA. [click heading for more]