Nuance acquires Spinvox for £64m

NUANCE Communications, the US-based voice recognition specialist has announced that it has acquired SpinVox, the voice-to-text services business.

By integrating SpinVox’s carrier services with Nuance’s advanced speech recognition platform, Nuance is looking to accelerate the growth of its voice-to-text business and scale to meet the needs of a growing, global customer base.

“Around the world, the voice-to-text market has experienced tremendous growth over the last year, with a variety of innovative services being delivered by carriers and unified communications providers,” said John Pollard, vice president, Nuance Voice-to-Text Services. “With SpinVox’s robust infrastructure, language support and operational experience, we will broaden the reach and capabilities of our platform.”

Nuance has said that it is too early to say what impact the deal will have on Spinvox's 230 staff. It also declined to comment on whether Spinvox founders Christina Domecq and Daniel Doulton are to remain on board.

Spinvox has had some difficulties recently - more than $200m had been invested in the company and it had also been given a £30m loan. Some speculation has suggested that Nuance is more interested in Spinvox's contracts with major telecoms firms - such as Telefonica - than in its technology.

As was reported on iSM at the time, doubts had been raised on the effectiveness of Spinvox's speech-to-text software - the company claims to use advanced voice recognition software, but a BBC investigation found that human operators were also involved in transcribing many messages.

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