Nuance Acquires Speech Recognition Software Company SVOX

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Thursday, June 16th, 2011

Nuance is picking up another company today, acquiring SVOX, a company that developers voice recognition software for in-car systems and consumer electronics. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Nuance, which also develops imaging and voice recognition technologies, is using the acquisition to enter the automotive industry. As the company says in the release, consumers are using speech recognition to access mobile Web content, find local businesses, get directions, and create and listen to messages.

The combination of Nuance’s and SVOX’s technology will help automakers integrate this functionality in cars.

Nuance also announced that it closed its $157 million acquisition of print management and cost recovery software developer Equitrac.

The fact that Nuance is making a few serious acquisitions isn’t surprising. The company has a market cap os $6 billion and also may have some key partners as well. Apple appears to be licensing Nuance’s technology in OS X Lion. And we heard that Nuance was in negotiations with Apple for a partnership to license and use the company’s voice recognition technology, though Nuance was missing from the lineup of products revealed last week’s WWDC conference. And we’ve learned that Apple may already be using Nuance technology in their new massive data center in North Carolina.

Website: nuance.com
Launch Date: 1992
IPO: NASDAQ:NUAN

Nuance Communications, Inc. provides speech, imaging and keypad solutions for businesses, organizations and consumers worldwide. The company’s solutions are used every day by people and businesses for tasks and services, such as requesting account information from a phone-based self-service solution, dictating records, searching the mobile Web by voice, entering a destination into a navigation system, or working with PDF documents. The company, through the acquisition of Philips Speech Recognition Systems GMBH (PSRS), provides speech recognition solutions for the European...

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