Nuance, Tegic and the woes and comeback of mobile speech
So the big news this week is Nuance’s acquisition of the month: Tegic. Tegic supplies T9 predictive text input to several mobile phone manufacturers. The acquisition represents Nuance’s recent focus on acquiring mobile technology market companies. It serves Nuance with a strategic customer base, including obvious candidates for Nuance’s speech technologies. Aside from the strategic benefits, the technical result of mixing predictive text input with speech is interesting and something to be followed.
Coincidentally, the woes and comeback of using speech for I/O on mobile devices are described in these articles this week.
Lastly here is an interesting interview with Lin Chase, director of Accenture R&D in Bangalore, India, who held several prominent positions in the speech tech industry in the past. Topics include speech, women in the industry and why Americans should travel.
June 27th, 2007 at 3:13 am
Combining predictive text iunput with speech would be awesome: a gadget that knows what you want to say!
Should also be a great help to stutterers ;-)
June 27th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Good point – you simply type in the first three characters and then say (stutter) the rest. It’s probably not the strategic customer base, but who knows, maybe this is an emergent side-effect in terms of accessibility.