Nuance inks Nokia deal for speech, text recognition

Nuance Communications Inc. announced a deal to provide mobile speech and predictive text capabilities “across a broad range” of devices from Nokia Corp.
The world’s largest handset maker will license Nuance’s technology and partner with the Burlington, Mass.-based firm to offer open protocols for use by developers. Application creators will be able make use of a series of APIs, language models and other development tools as part of the effort, which is designed to spur innovative products that integrate Nuance’s offerings on Nokia devices.
This has been a busy week for Nuance; the company also inked a deal with T-Mobile USA Inc. for its customer-care application.
The collaboration is the latest effort by mobile players to entice developers to build to specific platforms. Apple Inc. and Google Inc. are aggressively pursuing developers of mobile entertainment offerings – as are several network operators – and Research In Motion Ltd. today released new developer tools including a BlackBerry Java Development Environment and desktop simulators for the Storm, Bold and Pearl Flip handsets.