Perhaps no other player has invested as much in the speech-recognition market as Nuance Communications Inc. The Burlington, Mass.-based company has spent more than $1 billion in the past two years as it acquired competing firms and broadened its portfolio. We talked to Steve Chambers, president of Nuance Mobile and Consumer Services Division, about Nuance’s new Voice Control application, last year’s acquisition of Tegic Communications Inc. and whether speech-recognition applications are finally gaining acceptance among wireless users.
Q: Nuance launched Voice Control last August, and the offering has quickly become one of the company’s most important mobile offerings. What does the application deliver other than simple voice-driven commands like dialing a contact?
A: Nuance Voice Control is actually 15 applications off of one button push. Here’s what’s available: You hit the side button, hear a chirp, and you can say “sports,” “news,” “stocks,” or you can say “send SMS” to someone in your address book. You can send an instant message or an e-mail up to 30 words. If you’re searching, there’s information retrieval that can find a Starbucks near Tremont Street in Boston.
Q: Consumers have been slow to use voice to control their phones in even the simplest ways. How are Nuance customers using the application?
A: Sprint’s subscribers use it about 60 times a month. About 50% of the time people are using it for commands and controls like dialing a number, dialing and then using their address books. Twenty-five percent of the time it’s messaging — instant messaging, SMS or e-mail, and the other 25% of the time they use it for searching. That’s the rough distribution of what people are using the service for.
Q: Many observers were surprised last year when Nuance spent $265 million to acquire Tegic Communications Inc., a predictive text developer, from AOL. What role does Tegic’s technology play in the Voice Control product?
A: We can share dictation, we can share language models. But we want to share those between the text-input and the speech-input worlds. And it’s not only dictation — it allows you to use unlimited words, and it gets smarter as it trains on your voice. As you’re texting it also uses those dictionaries (from prior use), and it starts to understand how you work. And I didn’t mention XT9. It’s predictive text for all the phones that look like the iPhone, with soft QWERTY keyboards and touch screens. Those really need predictive text because it’s sloppy as hell to write on those keyboards.
Q: Speech-recognition technology has been around for years, but mobile users seem to have a hard time grasping the idea of using voice instead of their fingers to control their phones. Do you think that is finally changing?
A: I think it’s really seen in the commercials for Ford SYNC (which Nuance powers); you can see they really play off the simplicity with humor. … That’s such a good example of the zeitgeist, of how the rank and file starts to understand, ‘Yeah, that was on Star Trek, and now it can do things as day-to-day relevant to me as turning on my radio or the climate controls in my car.
Q: We were surprised to see Nuance among the members of Google Inc.’s Open Handset Alliance. What’s your role there?
A: We contributed some very introductory voice-recognition technologies — certainly nothing like full Nuance voice control, but something a user could work with to understand (the capabilities of speech-recognition technology). We’re working with Google to make that available as open source software, so people can start designing speech into the ground level of the phone. Personally, I think the Open Handset Alliance really gives the OEMs exactly what the want, with real cost-competitive phones. And it gives the developer community what they want: one OS with developer tools and seeded applications like raw speech capability. Android puts so much mobile information at my fingertips; it elicits a very different reaction. We wanted to put the speech part out there, get it more known, so it incents (developers) to come to us for the full footprint that we can then monetize.
