Nuance confirms acquisition of voice-to-text company Spinvox for $102 million

Nuance has confirmed the story VentureBeat broke earlier this morning, that it has acquired voice-to-text company SpinVox for $102 million. The company said it was buying Spinvox to expand the voice-to-text part of its speech-recognition business.
In its statement, Nuance said it would integrate SpinVox’s technology, which is used by several international telecom carriers, into it speech recognition service offerings.
The company says there are now more than a billion voicemail boxes in the world, and that more than 150 billion voicemails are created a year, and that this has created strong interest in voice-to-text automation services. The two companies have helped “pioneer solutions that utilize speech recognition and transcription workflow solutions to convert voicemails into text that can be sent to users as SMS or email messages,” the company said.
In its statement, Nuance said it intends to accelerate growth in three key areas:


Service quality. The combination of SpinVox’s global infrastructure with Nuance’s proven speech recognition technology provides robust, carrier-grade voice-to-text services with outstanding quality, ISO security certification, and highly-scaled production systems that handle millions of messages per day;
Global reach. The combination will achieve the broadest language support in the industry, including English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese, and a customer list that includes major carriers throughout North America, Europe, South America, and Australia; and,
Innovation. By combining Nuance’s sophisticated speech recognition technologies with both companies’ experienced solutions development teams, Nuance expects to accelerate innovation for voice-to-text services. The acquisition creates a voice-to-text platform – comprising full and partial speech automation, Web services integration and advanced features – that is state-of-the-art today, and offers customers and partners the assurance of technological leadership through its robust product and services roadmap.