After losses and drama, more than $100 million in outside funding and a $500 million valuation, reports say London-based Spinvox could be bought for a mere $150 million by Nuance Communications, as Nuance tries to consolidate its leadership position in speech and voice recognition services. Read More »
Tech
Nuance Communications, a provider of various speech recognition and predictive text products, said today it’s purchased Jott, whose service translates spoken messages into text and then emails or inserts them into various web services, for an undisclosed sum. As part of the deal, John Pollard, co-founder… Read More »
Realizing that the phone is now a computer, or possibly that ubiquitous wireless networks mean that computers can go anywhere, IBM said today it would spend $100 million on research over the next five years to improve mobile communications for businesses and consumers… Read More »
Nuance Communications said today it’s offering an upgrade to its line of speech recognition software aimed at carriers and handset makers. The new software includes a combination of on-handset speech recognition and server-based transcription that means it can do far more than navigate an address… Read More »
Updated: On Monday, Qualcomm announced a location-based recommendation engine powered by Xiam, which it acquired last March. The service (offered through carriers) takes demographic information, a user’s personal preferences and geographic location, and serves up lists of places and events that the user might… Read More »
Nuance Communications said today it’s bought several patents related to IBM’s speech recognition technology, joining Microsoft as one of the two the largest licensors of such technology. IBM, Nuance and Microsoft all provide speech-to-text and voice recognition products, an industry that’s growing in importance as… Read More »
Vlingo’s new software for BlackBerrys (the link goes live at 5 a.m. PT), which gives me the ability to navigate my phone entirely by voice, has me feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. I press a button on my Pearl, wait for a chime,… Read More »
When it comes to mobile phones, it’s all about touch screens — this year. But what will they look like in four or five years? I recognize that in 25 years they’ll be implanted into our bodies, à la Ray Kurzweil’s thesis, but how… Read More »
Now that the haze of exhaustion has worn off, I’m reviewing my notes from CTIA. Our cheat sheet was spot on — with the exception of an Android phone, that is. The same prototypes were available that folks saw in February at the Mobile… Read More »
Speech recognition company Vligno has scored a $20 million second round of funding led by Yahoo, and through a relationship with the search company, access to 600 million cell phone subscribers worldwide. As I noted earlier, Yahoo said today it will use Vlingo… Read More »
London startup SpinVox raised $100 million today in a round of financing that values the company at $500 million. That’s big money for a company that translates voicemails into text, but SpinVox appears to have achieved some valuable intellectual property associated with its speech-to-text… Read More »
