MWC: Nuance brings voice control to touchscreens

Nuance Communications (NASDAQ:NUAN) has had a busy week at Mobile World Congress with news on both the customer care and speech-to-text fronts. It announced today it would acquire MacSpeech, a company that provides speech-to-text for the Mac OS X, potentially extending its reach to the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad. On the mobile side, Nuance also unveiled a version of its predictive T9 text technology, T9 Write, tailored for touchscreen devices or pen-based devices with multi-touch.

According to the company, the new T9 technology blends handwriting input with Nuance’s XT9 predictive text to predict words as they are written. Handwriting recognition coupled with predictive input will give consumers the option of typing on the touchscreen keypad or using voice dictation. A learning engine in the software also supports multi-touch gestures and user-generated shortcuts, such as swiping the finger to delete a letter, two fingers to delete a word or more to erase an entire message.

T9 Write will support any operating system and more than 40 languages, the company said. It can learns a user’s preferred vocabulary and add new words based on his communication pattern. For smaller screens, a handwriting method Nuance calls ‘on-top writing’ lets users write each letter or symbol directly on top of each other instead of spanning the entire screen.

Nuance said that it acquired MacSpeech to extend its Dragon Naturally Speaking product line for PCs to the Mac market. MacSpeech has licensed the Dragon dictation technology since 2008. But running on Macs as a native application will let also open the door to Apple’s recently announced iPad tablet. On the iPad, Nuance could offer an alternative to the device’s touchscreen keyboard, letting users switch between writing and keyboard input by tapping the screen.

MacSpeech is the latest in Nuance’s string of acquisitions as the voice recognition company has grown its dominance in speech technology, as well as expanded the variety of devices it is available on. It acquired consumer favorite Jott for voice-to-text capabilities aimed at mobile operators and enterprises last summer and, most recently, bought up its biggest competitor SpinVox for voicemail-to-text transcription services.

As touchscreens have become the norm, there has been even more experimentation with text input on the often smaller keypads. Swype is another company gaining traction with a technology for text input based on fluid on-screen motions. The software is pre-installed on the Samsung Omnia II, as well as on more T-Mobile Android devices, starting with the myTouch. At MWC, the company announced it has raised $1 million in series B extension funding, bringing its combined series B funding to $6.6 million. Nokia Growth Partners and Samsung Ventures are among its other financial backers. Samsung is also one of Nuance’s big customers using both its Mobile Care services and XT9 predicative text on its mobile phones.