Nuance and IBM to license and integrate speech technologies

Nuance, or as everyone knows them as Dragon Naturally Speaking, will be licensing and adding the speech technologies from IBM into their software. IBM as I remember a while back had a system called “VIA Voice” and there may be a few other names of their speech recognition technologies as well.

It is a ways down the road, but it appears that the combination will offer the best of both worlds with being able to integrate 2 speech recognition technologies.

BURLINGTON, MA and ARMONK, NY, January 15, 2009 — Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a leading provider of speech solutions, and IBM (NYSE: IBM), a pioneer in speech technology, today jointly announced that Nuance and IBM have entered into a licensing and technical services agreement to enhance and expand innovative speech solutions designed to better serve enterprises, consumers, carriers, and partners worldwide.

With the objective of advancing customer access to speech innovation, Nuance and IBM technologists will cooperate to incorporate IBM technology into Nuance’s speech solutions. Nuance expects the first integrated speech innovations combining Nuance and IBM technologies to be available within two years. IBM will continue to serve its own customers. In a second component of the agreement, Nuance will purchase speech-related patents from IBM.

“IBM and Nuance share a vision to proliferate advanced speech capabilities across a broad range of devices and environments,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, IBM senior vice president and director, IBM Research. “We recognize that Nuance is a leader in the speech marketplace and we believe this technology agreement will accelerate the delivery of speech innovations to the world’s consumers.”