Nuance buys UK voice-to-text rival

Published: 01/02/2010 | Last Revision: 01/02/2010

Massachusetts-based Nuance Communications, developers of Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition packages, has purchased financially troubled UK voice-to-text vendor Spinvox. The British company, which specialises in converting voicemail messages to SMS and email, had gone through a series of refinancings in the previous 18 months and was widely rumoured to be up for sale.

Announcing the purchase, Nuance emphasised SpinVox’s ‘global infrastructure’, stating that it would be combined with Nuance’s own proven speech recognition technology to accelerate and scale its voice-to-text business. Less was said about SpinVox’s D2 voice message conversion system (also known as ‘the Brain’), which became the cause of some embarrassment to the company last year after a TV report highlighted the fact that many messages were, in fact, being converted by human operators. Some analysts are seeing the purchase as a defensive move by Nuance against the threat posed by Google Voice, the currently-previewing single-number telephony service which includes voice-to-text. SpinVox, meanwhile, continues to operate, with its Web site stating that its voice-to-text services will continue unchanged.