In what Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan calls a ‘good outcome’ on Twitter, the voice-to-text technology company has just been acquired by speech recognition king Nuance.

Notably, Nuance has repeatedly sued Vlingo over patent infringement – and tried to acquire them – in the past, and Grannan once referred to competing with Nuance as “having a venereal disease that’s in remission”.

Vlingo even bought patents and eventually countersued Nuance to fend them off.

Anyway, the deal is done: Nuance is buying the company for an undisclosed sum, and says it allows them to combine their innovation and R&D expertise in the field of natural language interfaces.

Vlingo has been likened by some as a ‘Siri for Android’, offering voice-enabled Virtual Assistant apps for a wide range of mobile devices (not just Android phones but also Nokia, iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Phone handsets) that turn spoken words into a variety of actions.

For what it’s worth, Vlingo says it’s way better than Siri. And the elephant in the room is of course that Siri is almost certainly powered by Nuance technology. And that Nuance offers Dragon Go.

Founded in 2006, Vlingo was backed by Charles River Ventures, Sigma Partners, Yahoo and AT&T.

According to the suit, which we’ve embedded below, Nuance claims Vlingo is infringing on number of Nuance’s patents including U.S. patent no. 6,487,534 B1, which relates to a “Distributed Client-Server Speech Recognition System.” By making, using, selling, offering to sell, and or importing its products and services related to speech recognition, Nuance says Vlingo is infringing on its patent.

Nuance is also claiming that Vlingo is infringing on that U.S. patent no. 6,785,653 B1, which is titled “Distributed Voice Web Architecture and Associated Components and Methods,” U.S. patent no. 6,839,669 B1, titled “Performing Actions Identified in Recognized Speech;” U.S. patent number No. 7,058,573 B1, titled “Speech Recognition System to Selectively Utilize Different Speech Recognition Techniques Over Multiple Speech Recognition Passes;” and U.S. patent no. 7,127,393 B2, titled “Dynamic Semantic Control of a Speech Recognition System.”

Nuance is requesting that Vlingo pay damages for infringing and profiting off the patents, but it’s unclear what the dollar amount of these damages are.

The two companies have a bit of a storied past. Nuance slapped Vlingo with a patent lawsuit back in 2008. Vlingo then bought a number of patents last year relating to voice and speech recognition, that aimed to force Nuance to drop its suit.

Dave Grannan, CEO of Vlingo, recently compared the act of competing with Nuance to
“having a venereal disease that’s in remission.” He tells Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “We crush them whenever we go head-to-head with them. But just when you’re thinking life is great – boom, there’s a sore on your lip.” Gross.

Nuance is a massive company with a $6 billion market cap and is a formidable competitor. In fact, 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 this 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.

Photo Credit/Flickr/KWDesigns

Thanks to a partnership with Vlingo, owners of Android 2.0 or higher-equipped phones can now check in to Foursquare and update their status on Facebook and Twitter simply by speaking into their phones.

To try it out, download the free Vlingo app to your Android handset.

Using your voice, you can then update your location status on Foursquare by saying “check into Logan Airport”, locate your friends with commands like “where are my friends?” and “who’s nearby?” as well as send shout-outs to your buddies (e.g. “shout at Logan Airport waiting to board a plane to San Francisco”).

That’s not all though. The latest version of the Vlingo app also lets users share the service with their friends with the click of a button and also update their status on Facebook, Twitter and/or Foursquare at the same time by saying “social update” and speaking the message.

Previous Vlingo features remain, too: you can still use the app to send text and email messages, search the web, use Google maps and more.

As for BlackBerry, iPhone and Nokia S60 users – they’ll have to be patient for a while before they can start updating their status and locations with their voice.

Vlingo says it plans to roll out this functionality to other supported platforms in a future release but didn’t mention specific dates.

Do you consider voice-driven applications to be an ideal way to interact with mobile apps on your phone? Why (not)?

Voice search on mobile phones is increasingly becoming a viable alternative to pecking away on your tiny, touchscreen keyboard. Google has great voice search in both its iPhone and Android apps. Apple just bought Siri, which is a voice-powered personal search assistant. And then there is Vlingo, a Cambridge, Mass.-based voice search company backed by Charles River Ventures and Yahoo.

Today, Vlingo is launching a new Android app called SuperDialer. “Think of it as your infinite address book in the cloud,” says CEO Dave Gannon. It is essentially a voice-powered directory that returns local business search results instead of having to dial 411. If you say “pizza,” it will return the nearest pizza places based on your location. For each listing, you can call, see it on a map, get directions, or read reviews.

Vlingo’s voice apps have been downloaded more than 5 million times already, mostly on BlackBerry, but its iPhone app is even more popular than Siri’s (it is ranked No. 36 in productivity, versus No. 39 for Siri). The apps let you search the Web by speaking, voice dial, or speak a Twitter or Facebook status update. If you want to be able to dictate text messages or email using its speech-to-text technology, you have to pay $10 to $20. Gannon says Vlingo gets an 8 percent conversion rate of free to paid subscribers. But with SuperDialer, it will also make money off sponsored search results.

Mobile search and general Web search are two different beasts, especially when it comes to voice search, which is becoming increasingly popular. The list of the top ten mobile voice searches below by mobile voice app startup Vlingo confirms that people are much more action-oriented when they are on the go. The top search, curiously, is “YouTube,” which suggests more people than you might think are watching videos on their phones. But the next two, “Facebook” and “MySpace,” are social networks, suggesting that people want to stay connected to their friends on the go, which is what phones were originally intended to do. “Twitter” is No. 6 on the list.

Facebook and Twitter are also on Google’s list of top searches for 2009, but that list is dominated more by news, entertainment, and celebrity related searches such as “Michael Jackson,” “New Moon,” and “Lady Gaga.” The Vlingo list is dominated by more specific, action-oriented searches such as “Weather” (Is it safe to go out?), “Movie Times” (What can I see right now?), “Yellow Pages” and “White Pages” (I need to call someone right now and want to avoid 411 fees).

Vlingo’s mobile voice apps are used by 3 million people worldwide across a variety of devices, including iPhones, Blackberries, Windows Mobile, and Nokias. Voice search represents about 20 percent of the usage of the apps, which can be used for speech-to-text dictation for emails and text messages as well.

Top 10 Mobile Voice Searches for 2009

1. YouTube
2. Facebook
3. MySpace
4. Weather
5. Movie Times
6. Twitter
7. Yellow Pages
8. MapQuest
9. craigslist
10. White Pages

Anyone who’s called customer service knows voice guided phone applications aren’t new, but they’re a good way to navigate menus and enter text. And applications like Spinvox which incorporated speech recognition to turn verbal voicemails into written text messages, and TellMe, which uses voice recognition to power local search, are useful and popular.

Cambridge-based Vlingo wants to make voice enabling applications easier, by using their own speech-to-text J2ME/Brew application API (Windows/Symbian later this year). With the API, developers will be able translate a user’s voice to text, and use it in their application as if typed directly into the program. One of their first examples was for local search and shopping. Vlingo voice-enabled a text box on the program you could fill out by holding down the talk button and saying a phrase, like “Pizza in San Francisco”. The system then fills in the form with what you said, letting you modify the text normally if it gets it wrong.

In our trials the system generally worked with my Californian accent. However, an Australian accent had very little luck, highlighting the difficulties of internationalizing speech recognition. Often speech recognition companies make their jobs easier by limiting the vocabulary or training the system on a comprehensive lexicon of words and accents. But due to the breadth of their effort, Vlingo had to take a more general approach, using machine learning through statistical analysis so the system could work in a wider array of uses. There’s a demo below.
http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/271548276Their system starts with a basic statistical language model to make the best guess about what you say. It then improves upon that by taking into account context, and positive and negative user feedback down to the individual. Context helps the system by narrowing the number of possible words you said. For instance, if the context is an address, the number of possible street names is limited to the ones in the city. User feedback correcting the system’s output or leaving it be helps the system learn how you speak (e.g correcting Austin to Boston).

It’s a very ambitious project, but the team behind it comes with some significant experience in the speech recognition space. The two co-founders (Mike Phillips and John Nguyen) worked for SpeechWorks, which was acquired by ScanSoft, which then renamed itself Nuance. Nuance most recently paid $293 million for VoiceSignal, a company using speech recognition for mobile search in 21 languages.

Vlingo plans on monetizing the service by charging developers on a cost per month or per user basis. They’re a team of 13 with $6.5 million from CRV and Sigma Ventures.