Nuance Communications announced Tuesday that it would acquire Cambridge, Mass.-based rival Vlingo, Inc. – putting aside acrimony and litigation to combine their resources and bring language understanding and semantic processing to bear on industries such as healthcare.
Officials note that with consumer demand for virtual assistant and voice-enabled capabilities having increased drastically in recent months – most notably with Apple's Siri technology – both Nuance and Vlingo see a great opportunity for more devices that understand the spoken word.
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"Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple's Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services, " said Mike Thompson, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile. "By acquiring Vlingo, we are able to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet this demand."
The two companies have a history of legal skirmishes. Just this past September, Vlingo filed suit against Nuance, alleging unfair competition, corporate bribery and more. Now those lawsuits will be stayed as the two companies set their sites on bolstering their position in the speech recognition space against incursions from Apple and Google. Nuance officials tout the combined firm's plans to develop intelligent mobile assistants to help doctors, patients and consumers engage in more natural interactions with devices and systems.
[See also: Nuance buys Webmedx.]
"Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding," said Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan. "As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers."
