Nuance’s expansion continues with Jott acquisition

Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced its latest acquisition of consumer voice-to-text provider Jott. Nuance already provides the majority of voice-recognition technologies that application providers use in their mobile software, but its acquisition of Jott will allow it to scale a popular consumer service and expand its own services portfolio in speech and input technologies.

Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of Nuance, said that Nuance and Jott shared a vision of taking their similar voice services to the next level – meaning to a broader audience of mobile operators, enterprise and customer relationship management (CRM) providers.

“This acquisition is much more about the enthusiasm, the innovation and the user feedback and excitement about that holistic Jott service,” Thompson said. “That holistic service uses a wide range of technologies – speech technologies, voice technologies, telephony – but the whole package is very, very exciting. Most importantly, users love this service.”

Jott was founded in 2006 by John Pollard and Shree Madhavapeddi with the goal of making transcription accessible to anyone with a cell phone. Its services include Jott Assistant, which enables users to create notes, set reminders and appointments, send emails and text messages and post to Web services all by voice. The software is in use by hundreds of thousands of users on a range of devices, according to the company. Jott also offers Jott Salesforce integration, including open interfaces for voice integration with third-party CRM providers, and Jott Voicemail, a speech-to-text service similar to Nuance’s own. All three services will remain available for new and existing customers.

About a year ago Jott transitioned its free subscriber base to a paid subscription service, a challenging task for any mobile service. Madhavapeddi said that the company had a loyal subscriber base and was able to do so through direct communication with them. Jott now offers services in the range of $3.95 to $25 per month.

“As the economy changed, we decided we would focus on figuring out what people are willing to pay for,” Madhavapeddi said. “We had a bunch of focus groups and conversations with our customers and did analysis of peoples’ backgrounds and came out with plans that worked well for our customers. We had a low-usage model priced low and an extreme-usage model priced competitively and a pay-per-use model as well.”

Jott also has experienced in the Web 2.0 world with Jott links, application programming interfaces for web developers to leverage its speech recognition. Madhavapeddi said that with almost no marketing, they had 50 people sign up to integrate Jott into various calendars and services. With Nuance’s scale behind it, his goal is to take it further and make the APIs more flexible to integrate into enterprise apps as well. “Our goal is to voice-enable these enterprise applications like CRM and allow broad usage of these applications,” he said.

Following the acquisition, Nuance will package and offer Jott Assistant to mobile operators as part of its voice services portfolio, which also includes voicemail-to-text. The company will also offer its enterprise unified communications partners an enterprise-focused package including voicemail-to-text, messaging and collaboration tools. Nuance will also continue its CRM partner program expansion.

Over the past few years, Nuance has become a dominant provider of speech and imaging technology for businesses and consumers that use the technology for convenience, as well as a way to communicate hands free in while driving. Its technology is in use in phones ranging from high-end smartphones to lower-end feature phones through a powerful network applications server letting operators’ speech-enable any function in the mobile phone outside of just simple requests.