Major breaking news in speech tech: Nuance announced today that it will scoop up Vlingo. Oh, and happy Hanukkah (not in the press release).

Supposedly Vlingo was the other company that Apple was evaluating when developing Siri on the iPhone 4S. Here’s a bit of backstory between Vlingo and Nuance. It’s not pretty, but now it’s over. TechCrunch also chimes in.

This would be the gazillionth company that Nuance has acquired in recent years. In fact, there are hardly any other competitors left, so I predict that the speech giant may enter a new market soon. I’m thinking a wearable device for pets which will translate barks and meows into synthesized human speech. It’ll need a lot of animal test subjects in such case, therefore don’t be surprised if it starts buying pet stores (chains and mom-and-pops) as well as operate zoos.

General consumers and techies alike have raised concerns over AT&T buying T-Mobile (deal is now off) for fear of an anti-competitive carrier marketplace. Yet nobody thinks about the speech marketplace whenever they ask Siri to perform a task.

The press release:

Burlington, Mass. – December 20, 2011 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Vlingo, Inc. Fueled by unprecedented demand for intelligent voice interfaces that combine voice, language understanding and semantic processing, Nuance and Vlingo will combine their deep innovation and R&D expertise to deliver next-generation natural language interfaces across numerous markets and industries.

Consumer interest and demand for virtual assistant and voice-enabled capabilities have exploded in recent months, creating a $5 billion market opportunity that spans phones, tablets, cars, televisions, navigation devices, music players, PCs and more. Both Nuance and Vlingo see an unprecedented appetite for intelligent devices that understand the spoken word and deliver outcomes for consumers and professionals.

“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.”

“Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding. 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,” said Dave Grannan, CEO, Vlingo.

By harnessing the combined expertise in voice, language and multilingual capabilities, Nuance will be able to take advantage of the adoption of intelligent mobile assistants, where consumers, businesses, doctors and patients can engage in more human, natural interactions with devices and systems all over the world.

Vlingo is a Virtual Assistant that turns your words into action by combining voice to text technology, natural language processing, and Vlingo’s Intent Engine to understand the user’s intent and take the appropriate action. Founded in 2006, Vlingo is backed by Charles River Ventures, Sigma Partners, Yahoo! and AT&T and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information, go to www.vlingo.com.

Nuance is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications and professional services. For more information, please visit: nuance.com.

Nuance and the Nuance logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States of America and/or other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

Statements in this press release regarding the proposed transaction between Nuance and Vlingo, the market opportunity, the pace of innovation, increased customer demand in the mobile market, future product offerings by the combined company, and any other statements about Nuance managements’ future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans or prospects constitute forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any statements that are not statements of historical fact (including statements containing the words “believes,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “expects,” estimates and similar expressions) should also be considered to be forward looking statements. There are a number of important factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those indicated by such forward looking statements, including the ability to consummate the transaction; the ability of Nuance to successfully integrate Vlingo’s operations and employees; the ability to realize anticipated synergies and cost savings; the failure to retain customers; and the other factors described in the ability of Nuance to integrate the product offerings of the combined companies and other the factors described in Nuance’s Annual Report on Form 10 K for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2011 and other filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Nuance disclaims any intention or obligation to update any forward looking statements as a result of developments occurring after the date of this press release.

The Xbox 360 is great. And with Kinect it’s phenomenal. But for Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie to dismiss Apple Siri and brag about Tellme in Windows smartphones?

Utter embarrassment, especially coming from an executive who’s supposed to be the technology visionary of the company. (Heck, we all know Ballmer isn’t the guy.)

Tellme was rumored to have cost $800 million in 2007, but has the technology been stuck in the past?

It’s now evident that the software giant does not consider speech technology important and will likely pay a price for it, much like when it played catch-up during the Web boom. While Microsoft wasn’t looking, Nuance had scooped up dozens of other companies and partnered with Apple to give Siri a voice in the cloud.

And now the blogosphere is abuzz with this:

What does Tellme tell you?

Besides the significant hardware upgrades, the other selling point of the Apple iPhone 4S is Siri, the speech-enabled assistant that can help you schedule appointments, set reminders, read and compose SMS, and many other tasks. The technology is essentially a massive (considering how many iPhone 4S users are there in the U.S.) cloud-based speech recognition service reportedly provided by Nuance software.

Unfortunately Apple decided to make Siri only available on the iPhone 4S even though various resourceful hackers have proven that it can be run on the older 3GS and 4 models. Even the iPad 2 didn’t get Siri although its hardware is similar with the 4S.

Well, the folks at Applidium have cracked Siri’s protocol and published very informative technical details. Among them:

• Siri uses TCP port 443, over HTTPS (Secure HTTP)
• The request is a custom “ACE” method (as opposed to commonly used “GET”)
• Raw audio data is sent but compressed using Speex codec
• An iPhone 4S identifier is required with Siri

Is it game over for other speech tech companies?

Nuance is truly the dominating force in this area and with a partner like Apple, it’s reminiscent of the famed Wintel alliance that still exists today…

Today the company announced its NDEV Mobile program which offers its popular Dragon SDK to multiple platforms: Web-based, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7. Even the lowest tiered NDEV Silver membership will give a developer plenty of access to Nuance’s popular speech technologies.

And NDEV Silver is free. Yup, get ready to see many, many occurrences of people talking to their phones in the coming months…

See Nuance’s press release:

Burlington, Mass. – September 27, 2011 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced that its Nuance Mobile Developer Program, now NDEV Mobile, features new services that make it easier than ever for developers to voice-enable apps with Nuance’s industry leading speech technology. NDEV Mobile now features three new service tiers – Silver, Gold, and Emerald – that give developers more choice and flexibility in how they bring Dragon-powered innovations to market. The Dragon Mobile SDK made available through the NDEV Mobile program now also supports Windows Phone 7 in addition to Android and iOS, as well as an HTTP web services interface, and, brings developers eight new languages for voice recognition.

NDEV Mobile has already experienced great success since its launch in January, 2011, with more than 4,000 iOS and Android developers signing on to access the Dragon Mobile SDK across the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. This success has led to demand for even more flexibility and support in bringing voice-enabled applications to market. As such, NDEV Mobile now features three new tiers of service to better meet the diverse needs of the broader mobile developer community:

• NDEV Silver: NDEV Silver Services provide Android, Windows Phone 7 and iOS app developers with the ability to deploy their apps for free with the accuracy and reliability that only Nuance can provide. Developers will also have free access to Nuance’s connected text-to-speech (TTS) capabilities in over 30 languages, bringing natural sounding read back of text in the cloud. Further, NDEV Silver members get access to Bluetooth use cases and hands-free voice applications.NDEV Silver Services members have access to the world’s highest quality speech recognition technology for both general dictation and search. Additionally, the Dragon Mobile Developer Center provides a centralized resource for speech information and expertise including on-line forums, code samples, and full documentation.
• NDEV Gold: NDEV Gold Services offer access to SSL data encryption, more deployment flexibility and enhanced support. In addition to iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7, Gold Services members can take advantage of Nuance’s HTTP web service interface, which extends the power of Dragon to any mobile device while giving developers greater control over the user interface.NDEV Gold Services members’ applications can take advantage of SSL for encrypted data transmission, as well as open access to analytics tools that will help them maximize the impact and effectiveness of the voice experience their app delivers. Further, Gold Services members have access to one-on-one Nuance assistance in addition to the NDEV Mobile online community resources.
• NDEV Emerald: NDEV Emerald Services are designed to meet the unique needs of NDEV Mobile community members looking for a truly differentiated speech experience on their apps. NDEV Emerald members have an array of customization and service options that bring Nuance’s extensive speech expertise and service capabilities to a diverse developer base – ranging from start-ups to wireless carriers, OEMs, and large enterprises. Emerald Services include custom vocabularies and grammars, user experience consulting, speech integration, advanced text-to-speech, high-availability deployment, and unmatched Nuance support – pre and post deployment, including dedicated account management resources.

Available to all NDEV Silver, Gold, and Emerald members, are eight new speech-to-text languages supported by the Dragon Mobile SDK – Canadian French, Americas Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Taiwan Mandarin, and Cantonese – in addition to already supporting US, Australian and UK English, European Spanish, European French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese for dictation and search. Additional languages will continue to be added through the end of the year, offering developers broader geographic expansion and availability of their innovative voice-enabled apps across the globe.

“The success of our NDEV Mobile developer program has proven that our market-leading voice capabilities drive incredible value for developers across a variety of markets,” said Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile. “Our new multi-tiered services options deliver developers the options and services they’ve been asking for. It’s never been easier to deliver the power of voice-enabled apps to the market, tailored and customized to meet the needs of each app’s unique consumer base.”

NDEV Mobile has voice-enabled some of the market’s most popular apps, including Siri, Price Check by Amazon, Ask for iPhone, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, RemoteLink from OnStar, SpeechTrans, Yellow Pages and AirYell from Avantar, iTranslate, Taskmind, SayHi Translate, Vocre, Bon’App, and many others.

 The Dragon Mobile SDK is available for iOS 4.0 (iPhone/iPad/iPod touch), Android 2.1 and higher, Windows Phone 7.1 and via an HTTP web services interface. For more information about the NDEV Silver, Gold, and Emerald Services, please visit the NDEV Mobile developer portal at dragonmobile.nuancemobiledeveloper.com

Dragon has long been a leading speech recognition application on the desktop, used by millions of people around the world. Nuance has launched an array of Dragon applications across a variety of mobile platforms including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, and more.

To learn more, visit www.nuancemobilelife.com.

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world.  Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications.  For more information, please visitwww.nuance.com.

Nuance and the Nuance logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States of America and/or other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The statements in this press release relating to future plans, events or services, are forward-looking statements which are subject to specific risks and uncertainties. There are a number of factors which could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those indicated in such forward looking statements, including fluctuations in demand for the Nuance products, and the continued development of Nuance products. The reader is warned not to rely on these forward-looking statements without reservation, since these are simply reflections of the current situation. Nuance disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of developments occurring after the date of this document.

Have you ever been to Interspeech, the annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, held in beautiful Florence, Italy?

And you call yourself a hardcore speech technology nut?! Tell me if these PDFs make sense to you.

Well, it’s good to know that while some companies are busy buying up smaller competitors, there are brainiacs all over the world who actually fawn over speech recognition. Let’s thank Microsoft for pouring billions of dollars into its Research arms (yes, it has R&D facilities around the globe) so that we may one day face a Terminator who won’t mix up “Go fetch me a beer!” with “Gopher meets a deer!” and blow us into pieces because it thinks we are too dumb.

Microsoft researchers are improving large vocabulary speech recognition by enhancing neural network models of “senones” (so cutting edge that even Wikipedia doesn’t offer an explanation):

Earlier work on DNNs had used phonemes. The research took a leap forward when Yu, after discussions with principal researcher Li Deng and Alex Acero, principal researcher and manager of the Speech group, proposed modeling the thousands of senones, much smaller acoustic-model building blocks, directly with DNNs. The resulting paper, Context-Dependent Pre-trained Deep Neural Networks for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition by Dahl, Yu, Deng, and Acero, describes the first hybrid context-dependent DNN-HMM (CD-DNN-HMM) model applied successfully to large-vocabulary speech-recognition problems.

“Others have tried context-dependent ANN models,” Yu observes, “using different architectural approaches that did not perform as well. It was an amazing moment when we suddenly saw a big jump in accuracy when working on voice-based Internet search. We realized that by modeling senones directly using DNNs, we had managed to outperform state-of-the-art conventional CD-GMM-HMM large-vocabulary speech-recognition systems by a relative error reduction of more than 16 percent. This is extremely significant when you consider that speech recognition has been an active research area for more than five decades.”

Kudos, Microsoft. We cannot wait to see this breakthrough commercialized because, Lord knows, you could use some help:

(h/t Jason Hersh)

Earlier this month, there was the rumor about Telecom Italia offloading its speech services arm Loquendo. Then on August 13, The Washington Post reported Loquendo being sold to Nuance for $75.5 million.

However, as of the date and time of this post, neither Loquendo or Nuance has this information on their websites. The press release came from Telecom Italia:

Telecom Italia has announced the sale of its 99.98% stake in Loquendo to U.S. company Nuance Communications, Inc. on the basis of an enterprise value of €53 million.

The sale of Loquendo, a 2001 voice technology spin-off from Telecom Italia’s research labs with a workforce of around 100, is part of a process of rationalization of the Group’s shareholdings and a shift of focus toward its core business.

Nuance is committed to keeping the company’s headquarters in Turin, and creating a global centre of excellence in voice technology R&D and reinforcing its collaboration with Italian universities.

The deal is expected to close around the end of September.

Rome, 13 August 2011

Firefox developer Jennifer Boriss went to a local mall to find test subjects for field research into browser usage, especially in hopes of improving Mozilla Firefox.

Then she stumbled upon “Joe,” a 60-year-old gentleman with no knowledge of how to use a computer, let a lone a Web browser. She opened a browser and asked Joe to perform tasks with the goal of “finding a local restaurant to eat at.”

First, Microsoft Internet Explorer. Disastrous results:

Joe: “I don’t know what anything means.”

(Joe reads the text on IE and clicks on “Suggested Sites”)

Me: “Why did you click on that?”

Joe: “I don’t really know what to do, so I thought this would suggest something to me.”

Next, Firefox. No better, except the Help pull-down menu attracted Joe’s attention which, of course, was no help to the task at hand:

“Help, that’s what I need!” says Joe. He clicks on Help, but looks disappointed at what he sees in the menu.

“None of these can help me,” he says.

Last, Google Chrome. Score! — but only because of luck:

He proceeds to read all of the words on Chrome’s new tab page, looking for any that may offer guidance. Luckily for Joe, he spies a link to Yelp which is marked San Francisco in Chrome’s new tab page. He clicks it, and, seeing restaurants, declares he’s won.

Joe had absolutely no idea on even the very basics of computer usage… Mouse navigation, clicking, UI elements (e.g. text input field, scroll bar, etc.), but he knew that the computer was capable of finding information.

This is a good example of why speech technology will thrive in the years to come. For tech savvy folks speech tech may offer an alternative input method — a speedy one at that — but for many others speech recognition is the difference between being computer literate or not.

Speech tech leader Nuance is basking in some positively stellar publicity lately, mostly riding on the buzz about Apple’s upcoming iOS 5, Mac OS X “Lion” and the mega data center situated in a remote North Carolina town. The latest Apple mobile and desktop operating systems are said to have some deep integration to speech services from Nuance.

After years of mergers, acquisitions, and lawsuits, Nuance has finally struck gold with the Apple partnership. Forget telecom and IVRs — mobile consumer technology is where the bling is. Smartphone and tablet sales will no doubt exceed that of IVRs and speech servers.

Nuance and the speech industry in general have an intriguing history.

Things really took shape when four major players emerged in the 1990s: Lernout & Hauspie, Nuance, ScanSoft, and SpeechWorks. Back then the Internet was just blossoming, CPU, RAM, and storage were still expensive, and nobody’s heard of cloud computing yet. Speech innovation was highly dependent on the Ph.D. talents and R&D money. So naturally, companies with the thicker cash stash gained an advantage.

ScanSoft picked up some notable deals: Lernout & Hauspie (December 2001, filed for bankruptcy; Dragon Systems was acquired previously by L&H), SpeechWorks (August 2003), and LocusDialog (January 2004). In the span of three years the industry consolidated to just two big players: Nuance and ScanSoft.

Then in September 2005 a merger was announced between them, and the new entity to be called Nuance Communications.

Now came an acquisition binge, thanks to CEO Paul Ricci. Since 2000 there were 43 acquisitions. Some of the better-known buys included: Dictaphone (March 2006), Tegic Communications (August 2007), Jott Networks (July 2009), Spinvox (December 2009), and MacSpeech (February 2010).

Growth through M&A was just part of the story. Nuance was also busy in the courts fighting its up-and-coming, lesser-known competitors. One such unlucky competitor was Vlingo. According to a BusinessWeek article in May by author Peter Burrows:

“Competing with Nuance is like having a venereal disease that’s in remission,” says Dave Grannan, CEO of Vlingo, a speech-recognition startup that’s involved in five Ricci-related lawsuits. (Nuance has four suits against Vlingo; Vlingo has one against Nuance.) “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.”

Vlingo’s adventures with Ricci began in 2008, soon after Yahoo! (YHOO) chose Vlingo software over Nuance. Three months later, Grannan learned from a Boston Globe reporter that Nuance had filed a patent suit—without contacting the company to discuss royalties. “It was clearly an effort to hurt our business,” says Grannan, who expects to spend $15 million on legal fees. Nuance spokesperson Rebecca Paquette said neither Ricci nor the company would comment on specific lawsuits against Vlingo or others. “In these highly technical fields, many companies attempt to gain advantage by simply using Nuance’s inventions rather than developing their own,” she wrote in an e-mail. “We have a duty to our stockholders to preserve the value of the company and its assets.”

By summer 2009, with Vlingo running out of cash, according to Grannan, Ricci approached him about an acquisition. On Sept. 21, they met in San Francisco for a 14-hour negotiation. No agreement. Two days later, Ricci surprised Grannan and Vlingo co-founder Mike Phillips by calling to offer two more alternatives. First, Ricci promised to pay them and co-founder John Nguyen $5 million each if they could persuade their board to sell at his price. If that failed, and the three execs agreed to jump ship to Nuance, he’d pay them the amount they would have received in an acquisition—plus another $5 million if they stayed with the company for two years. As Ricci talked over speakerphone, Grannan says he looked at Phillips, mouthed “What the f—?”, and asked Ricci to repeat. Ricci, who speaks in the measured tones of an academic, obliged. After notifying Vlingo’s board of the offer, Grannan called Ricci back to express the board’s displeasure. “I was flabbergasted,” says Vlingo board member Bob Davoli. “I’ve been on 55 boards in my career and been a CEO twice—but I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

Vlingo’s board later accepted a $15 million investment in the company, after Ricci suggested that such a deal would align their interests and lead to a cessation of hostilities, says Davoli. “That was wishful thinking,” he says. Rather than drop the lawsuits, Ricci stopped taking Grannan’s phone calls. When Vlingo’s board stopped admitting a Nuance-appointed director to its board meetings, Nuance sued for the right to attend.

And guess what? Nuance is still knocking at Vlingo’s door: TechCrunch recently reported a new patent infringement lawsuit.

Tellme Networks also found itself enduring the wrath of Ricci in 2006:

In late 2006, Ricci took a run at a customer—Tellme Networks, which made an automated telephone-response system. Ricci had just purchased a company that made speech software used by Tellme. Mike McCue, Tellme’s then-CEO, says he was contacted by Ricci, who declared he’d sue Tellme, introduce a competing product, and refuse to sell it more software unless Tellme’s board agreed to sell to Nuance at Ricci’s price. “It was an all-out attack on every front,” says McCue, who now runs Flipboard, maker of a popular news app. McCue did sell the company in 2007—to Microsoft (MSFT), for a far higher price. (Press reports had it at around $800 million.) A court later dismissed Nuance’s patent claims as invalid. “We were able to outlast Nuance,” says McCue. “But a lot of companies can’t handle the pressure and give in. It’s happened time and again.” Ricci declined to comment on dealings with Tellme or Vlingo.

Nuance’s aggressive tactics aren’t just reserved for U.S. companies, either. The founder of an Indian speech company told me a story about his ordeal with Nuance. After being contracted to develop an application for Nuance, it poached the co-founder to work as an employee. (He left for Nuance within two months after being his business partner for nine years.) To add insult to injury, Nuance pre-emptively served legal notice in fear of a lawsuit going after this co-founder and his new employer. Efforts failed to negotiate a more reasonable, smoother transition for the co-founder to jump ship.

David vs. Goliath in the speech industry. David usually loses. From bleeding money and resources.

Indeed, from the BusinessWeek article:

Nuance’s Paul Ricci built the dominant speech-recognition company with engineering, acquisitions—and a lot of lawsuits.

What if a machine can tell whether a human is angry, sad, happy, or indifferent? Facial recognition research has also enabled studies on facial sentiment analysis, determining the emotion of a human by analyzing the dynamics of facial muscles. But video and image analysis take a lot more horsepower and dollars to be effective, and facial recognition applications are still mainly affordable only to research institutions, law enforcement agencies, military facilities, and large casinos (according to Hollywood).

But there’s a good chance that voice sentiment analysis becomes mainstream before its facial counterpart. After all, in many instances where we cannot see each other during a communication, voice is still the next best thing. Voice sentiment analysis is a branch of speech analytics, and some speech tech vendors may already claim their software’s sentiment analysis capabilities. However, a lot of the claim is based on searching for words or phrases from a person’s speech input (for example, looking for curse words).

Obviously this isn’t the ideal approach. As we all know, these four-letter words can also be dropped into expressing excitement and positive sentiment. You and I know clearly that “I’m gonna f–king cancel the service” and “I’m so f–king happy with this product” have completely opposite sentiments. But to a machine analyzing based on keywords — both could be flagged as negative responses.

A somewhat advanced algorithm would also take into account other words in the response. For example, scoring the “cancel” as negative and “happy” as positive following the f-word.

Even better is to factor in the voice acoustics. The pitch, speed, intensity, etc. of a vocal response could offer insight into the sentiment. Pay attention to your own voice next time when you’re happy or upset, and you may notice the difference.

The benefits of good voice sentiment analysis is apparent in the contact center environment. And there appears to be traction in this niche space…

Recently, startup Saygent received $1 million in funding to take voice sentiment analysis to the cloud. The founders/makers of Saygent also operate SayHired, an automated phone screening service with some high-profile customers like Hertz, esurance, and Great Clips. Saygent would be the new kid on the block to compete with some of the more established speech analytics vendors like Autonomy, CallMiner, Nexidia, NICE, and Verint.

Recently there’s quite a buzz — and new evidence — about a close partnership between Apple and Nuance. Speech technology is not new and neither is the fact that computer operating systems have incorporated it to a certain extent (mainly text-to-speech, or TTS). Remember when Steve Jobs introduced the first ever Mac on January 24, 1984? He actually allowed Mac to greet the audience (see 3:30 mark):

The robotic TTS doesn’t sound as sexy as Mac OS X’s Agnes, Kathy, Vicki, or Victoria, but the crowd went wild nonetheless. Back then it was pretty impressive for such a tiny computer to be able to speak. Even until today, Apple stayed true to its core philosophy of delivering the best user-friendly products, and part of that means adopting I/O interfaces that are natural to a human: speech, handwriting, and gestures.

The Mac introduction footage showed speech in Mac OS. It also exists in Mac OS X and iOS (as Voice Control, to a limited extent).

Handwriting recognition (or, as some may ridicule, the lack thereof) was one of the highlighted features of the Apple Newton, the grandfather of PDAs introduced in 1993. The technology is present in Mac OS X and iOS as well — for example, I’m able to input Chinese characters by writing on the trackpad or iPhone screen.

Starting with the iPhone came the prevalence of gesture input. We’re all quite familiar with the tapping, swiping, and pinching gestures in using the iPhone and other smartphones as well. Apple even made this available on devices with trackpads. This input method is by far the most natural — even toddlers “get it.”

But I digressed. This article is about how the Apple-Nuance partnership could impact customer service technologies.

So, what really caught my attention was a piece from TechCrunch:

In digging into the information about the relationship between the two companies, we had heard that Apple might actually already be using Nuance technology in their new (but yet to be officially opened) massive data center in North Carolina. Since then, we’ve gotten multiple independent confirmations that this is indeed the case. And yes, this is said to be the keystone of a partnership that Apple is likely to announce with Nuance at WWDC next month.

More specifically, we’re hearing that Apple is running Nuance software — and possibly some of their hardware — in this new data center. Why? A few reasons. First, Apple will be able to process this voice information for iOS users faster. Second, it will prevent this data from going through third-party servers. And third, by running it on their own stack, Apple can build on top of the technology, and improve upon it as they see fit.

We already know Apple’s interested in better speech tech. It bought Siri and has been soliciting speech-related engineers. If TechCrunch is right, it would be Apple’s foray into cloud-based speech tech. The company certainly has the money and know-how to grow another massive online service besides iTunes, App Stores, and MobileMe.

Proven Nuance speech technology hosted on Apple’s massive infrastructure? That’s a dream come true for a customer service app developer!

A company with a speech-enabled IVR can look into developing an iOS app that’s also speech-enabled, without having to burden the company’s speech servers. If the app can deliver on a better user experience with speech capabilities, can you imagine the number of calls reduced to the IVR? Phone calls and speech licenses are expensive, so divert these interactions to the app and through the user’s own monthly data subscription and Apple’s servers in N.C.

Plenty of companies already have their own iOS apps, but not many are focused on customer service. It’s time they think about the next version of their Company App — with speech.

Of course, this all hinges on Apple making the speech services unrestricted to developers. More reason to keep an eye on this year’s WWDC announcements. That is, if you’re passionate about better customer service, speech tech, and mobile apps.