Nuance’s expansion continues with Jott acquisition

Its acquisition of Jott is somewhat surprising given its existing strong portfolio of speech-to-text products, but it’s also the latest in what has been a string of acquisitions for Nuance. The company acquired AOL’s predictive text solution T9-maker Tegic Communications in 2007. Last year, it bought mobile software company SpapIn Software. More recently, Nuance acquired Philips Speech Recognition Systems embedded business and, in February, acquired Zi Corp, a mobile search and text input provider. Following this acquisition spree, Nuance ships on literally hundreds of millions of devices every year, Thompson said. The company’s overall acquisition strategy is to invest significantly in its technology and portfolio of speech and text capabilities, but also expand its portfolio in the application space and the full-blown services space, he said.

“A lot of people don’t know, but we provide full service for our healthcare business, we provide Nuance On-Demand for our enterprise business and Nuance voice-control and Nuance voicemail-to-text in our mobile operator business,” Thompson said. “All are full-on software-as-a-service capabilities that include any of our leading technologies, but at the end of the day our focus is services. [Jott] is an extension of that, and an exciting one at that.”

Nuance faces competition from big players in the speech services space, including Google and Microsoft, as well as dedicated speech-technology vendors like SpinVox, RingCentral, Pinger, GotVoice and SimulScribe. Without dismissing the competition, Thompson said the market is characterized by tremendous innovation and excitement, as evidenced by products like the Ford Sync, Apple Voice Control and a speech-enabled service from nearly every major OEM, many of which are already using Nuance.

“In the mobile space in particular, you constantly weigh the trade-offs between innovation on the cutting edge of what’s possible,” Thompson said. “We spend a lot of time on that. Then we spend a lot of time on the scaling and mainstream deployment of those solutions. It’s one thing to build something on one phone or on a small number of operator customers; it’s another to bring it to the mass market and ship it to millions of phones.”