Hear Me

Lot’s of thoughts…no time to share them…So I’ll be brief in a few different areas:

1. Thank you SIRI! Now every CE Company must have speech technology. How the world has changed, and after 18 years of Sensory being one of the only speech company focused on consumer electronics, now everyone is doing it!
2. What’s really weird is the number of chip companies and investment bankers that have been popping up on our doorsteps since SIRI shipped. Companies do move in herds!
3. Nuance buys Vlingo. Full disclosure…Vlingo is Sensory’s partner (we’ll see what happens after the deal closes.) How much was paid? (Rumor I keep hearing is the highway that runs near my house…) Why did they pay so much? (because they can, to end the personal lawsuit, to end the other lawsuits, to prevent market share from eroding, NOT to grow their technology base!)
4. Speaking of Vlingo, I really like that their newsletter and videos that imply they are better than SIRI because they have “more hands-free functionality”…that’s TrulyHandsfree by Sensory!
5. And what about the Justice Department’s investigation of Nuance (Don’t they have better things to do with our taxes these days?)…The Nuance/Vlingo’s position seems to be all about fighting Microsoft, Google, etc…which has some merit, but if it don’t have Android or Windows Phone, who ya gonna call? Nuance will always be on the list.
6. Sensory news…
   • Yeah! Our TrulyHandsfree is in Samsung’s Galaxy Note, introduced at CES!
   • Monster Cable showed a cool product at CES with TrulyHandsfree™ inside…they were kind enough to invite the Sensory crew to see Chicago. GREAT CONCERT! I think there were another 20-30 or so products on the CES floor with Sensory inside!
   • We also just got nominated for a Global Mobile Award at the Mobile World Congress.
   • And who says there’s a recession still going on? Our chip-based product sales are going through the roof! The success of our IC product line is also based on TrulyHandsfree because it enables a quasi-natural language interface.
   • Where in the world is Majel???? Sensory did a voice-controlled light switch a few years back with a company called VOS Systems. They licensed the Star Trek brand, used “Computer” as the voice trigger to control the lights, and even licensed Majel Roddenberry’s voice…pretty cool!

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

I started Sensory back in 1994. Since then, Sensory has put speech technologies into many hundreds of different consumer products. I have taken home many of these products to test out on my family and see what everyone thinks.

A strange and wonderful thing happened last week…I heard our phone ringing and a voice spoke out saying “incoming call from Joe Smith” (no it really wasn’t Joe Smith…) Anyways, the really cool thing was I recognized the voice telling me who was calling. It was Sensory’s Micro Text to Speech engine.

Turns out my wife had gotten tired of the old cordless phones in our house and had gone out and bought a new ATT System. Unbeknownst to her, she had purchased the ATT products which used Sensory’s Micro-TTS technology to announce the Caller ID.

Text to speech tends to be one of those technologies that the more memory you throw at it, the better it sounds. That’s because the best sounding TTS engines use “snippets” of real human recordings, and the more memory allowed, the more and bigger and more precise “snippets” can be used. I use the non-technical term “snippet” generically because different approaches use different sound units, ranging from diphones to even whole word or multi-word recordings.

For TTS to get really, really small, another approach needs to be used. Storing all those sounds will take MegaBytes of memory, and that added cost can have too big of a pricing effect on a low-cost consumer product. Sensory’s “micro-TTS” uses about 250K Bytes of total memory…that’s for the technology engine AND all the synthesized sound data. This is about 1000 times smaller than some of the high-end engines of today!

TTS has become an important area of investment for Sensory, and today there are many products on the market that use Sensory’s Micro-TTS, including products from ATT, VTech, Motorola, BlueAnt and others. Who knows…we may be already talking in your house too!

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

An interesting blog post (from PC World) came out following Apple’s iPhone 4s intro with Siri. I think everyone knows what Siri is…it’s the Apple acquisition that has turned into a big part of the Apple user experience. Siri technology allows a user to not only search but control various aspects of a smartphone by voice in a “natural language” manner.

The blog post depicts a looming showdown between Sensory and Apple’s Siri. It is quite kind to Sensory, pointing out our near-flawless performance in noise and how TrulyHandsfree™ does not require button presses. While those points are true, Sensory is certainly NOT a competitor to Siri. We do partner with companies like Vlingo that might be considered a Siri competitor, but Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree is just the first part of a multi-stage process for creating a true Voice User Interface.

Here is the basic process:

It’s just that first step that Sensory does better than anyone else. However, it’s an important step that requires a few critical characteristics:

1. Extremely fast response time. Since it basically competes with a button press, it has to have a similar or faster response time. Because TrulyHandsfree uses a probabilistic approach, it can respond without having to wait for the recognizer to determine if the word is even finished! Slow response times lead users to speak before the Step 2 recognizer is ready to listen, which is a major cause of failure.
2. Low power consumption. If it’s always on and always listening, it can’t be a power hog. Sensory can perform wake-up triggers with as little as 15 MIPS, and has the ability to operate in the 1-10mA range on today’s smartphones.
3. Highly accurate with poor S/N ratios. This means several things:
   • Works in high noise. TrulyHandsfree Voice Control performs flawlessly in extremely loud environments, including music playing in the background or even outdoors in downtown Portland!
   • Works without a microphone in close proximity. TrulyHandsfree is responsive even at distances of 20 feet (in a relatively quiet environment) and at arms length in noise. This is critical because many VUI based applications of the future will become commonplace in a wide variety of consumer electronics devices, and users won’t want to get up and walk over to their devices to control them.

Companies like Nuance, Vlingo, Google and Microsoft are pretty good at the second step, which is a more powerful (often cloud-based) recognition system.

The third step “Understanding Meaning” is what the original Siri was all about. This was an AI component developed under DARPA funding at SRI and later spun off and acquired by Apple. Apple is rumored to be using Nuance as the “Step 2” in Siri.

Vlingo does a really nice job of implementing Steps 1-3 (using Sensory as its partner for Step 1.) I’m sure Google, Microsoft, Apple and Nuance all have efforts underway in the area of AI and natural language understanding. It’s really not that different than what they have needed for text-based “meaning” recognition during traditional searches.

The SEARCH in Step 4 is done via typical search engines (Google, Microsoft, Apple) and I’d guess Vlingo and other independent players (are there any still around???) have developed partnerships in these areas.

Step 5 is basically a good quality TTS engine. Providers like Nuance, Ivona, ATT, NeoSpeech, and Acapella all have nice TTS engines, and I believe Apple, Microsoft and Google all have in-house solutions as well!

The important point in comparing Sensory’s technology is that we provide the logical entryway to a successful Voice User Interface experience–with a lightning-fast voice trigger that replaces tactile button presses. It is a given that noise immunity and extremely high accuracy are also required, and Trulyhandsfree accomplishes this without requiring a prohibitive amount of power to function reliably and consistently.

AND…while we appreciate the comparison to the most profitable company on the planet, we’d like to focus on what we do better…making Truly Hands-Free really mean Trulyhandsfree™.

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

I decided to pop up to San Francisco this week to hit the Intel Developer Forum. It’s open to the public, but it’s really more of a show and tell to Intel employees than from them.

One of the sessions was entitled “Enhanced Experiences with Low Power Speech Recognition,” and this was my main reason for being there. Intel’s Devon Worrell gave a very nice presentation, focusing on the importance of a closed computer being not just a brick, but still having functionality in a low power state. He put up a lot of compelling slides about using speech recognition in this mode, and emphasized the need for low-power command and control with an always-on always listening device that responds to commands…hmmmm…sounds like a page right out of the Sensory bible!

Realtek appears to have been selected by Intel as a chip provider for the low-power speech recognition, and they presented at the session and even gave a demo of their in-house speech recognition technology. I wasn’t very impressed; the idea was for it to work in music with the user not speaking directly into the microphone. For the demo, however, the music was so quiet the audience could barely tell it was on, and the speaker spoke only a few inches from the mic. I had a hard time understanding if it was working or not (well, that’s giving it the benefit of the doubt.)

Jean-Marc Jot from DTS also spoke and gave an impressive presentation and demo. Of course, I’m very biased….The DTS speech recognition demo used Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree™ Voice Control. I was a bit nervous because of Jean-Marc’s French accent and the fact that DTS had created their own TrulyHandsfree trigger phrase, “Hello Jennifer” without any assistance from Sensory. (As a side note, Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree 2.0 SUBSTANTIALLY improves performance, but there are a number of complex variables in our algorithm that are not accessible through our SDK’s, and therefore our customers can not yet use the latest technology to its fullest extent unless Sensory fine tunes the vocabularies in-house.) So…Jean-Marc was demoing our earliest incarnation of TrulyHandsfree Voice Control, with a French accent in a noisy room and with a command set that Sensory has never reviewed.

The demo was AWESOME. Jean-Marc spoke about 3 feet from the mic, and said commands like “Hey Jennifer…play Lady Gaga.” The music was cranked up really loud, and Jean-Marc spoke commands like “fast forward” and other music controls as well as calling up songs by name. I have a habit of counting speech recognition errors… On the trigger there were no false positives (accidental firing), and only 2 false negatives (where Jean-Marc needed to repeat the trigger phrase). That was 2 out of about 30 or 40 uses, indicating a 94% or 95% acceptance accuracy in high noise, and the phrases following the trigger had about the same high accuracy.

Sweet Demo of how speech recognition can work in a low-power mode and be always on and listening for commands even in high noise situations!

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

I’ll continue on with a few thoughts from yesterday’s blog because I got asked the question: “Why would speech patents be worth so much more than general telecom and other patents?”

There are 2 key reasons:

1. Speech is HUGE in mobile.
1. Look at Google/Android. I read in the Mercury News this week that Google believes 80% of its revenues will come from mobile phone search in the future. Let’s combine that with the old stat that 25% of Android search is voice search (this was a year or so ago, and it’s probably been growing). This would mean a minimum of 15% of Google’s overall revenues will come from mobile phone voice search…and this number will probably grow!
2. Apple. I guess its common knowledge that their new iOS5 will include “Assistant” that allows a complete voice controlled user experience. This is big. This is the company that defines user experiences, moving from a follower in speech technology to a leader (even if it is Nuance tech!).
2. Available speech patents are DECREASING. Remember when the Bass brothers started buying up silver to drive up the price? Scarcity increases price. Nuance has been “buying” speech patents at a faster rate than they are issued! Combine this with patent acquisitions by companies like Vlingo, (who spent in the 7 figures to buy up a large number of Intellectual Ventures speech patents in order to countersue Nuance,) and the available portfolio of speech patents is quite small. Finding patents with early priority dates are even scarcer.

As an interesting case in point, Sensory has a few key patents on client/server speech recognition approaches. We have a very early initial filing date from 1996 (if you want to know the patent number, drop me an email.) We went through 10 years of revisions and responses to the patent office and finally got 3 patents issued on our initial concepts of using client devices connected to more powerful servers with speech recognition (yeah that should sound familiar today, but it was a very unique idea in 1996!). These are VERY fundamental patents with a VERY early priority date. Back in the downturn of 2008 we talked to a patent auction house that gave a very thorough evaluation of the patents, and they concluded it would be the highest valued auction they had ever seen. They wanted a “reserve” price in the single million dollar digits, but we wanted it in the double million digits, so we never went forward. It just shows the importance of speech patents, and with the recent lawsuits in the mobile and speech community, speech patents have become even more valuable today!

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

Two BIG acquisitions happened over the last week. One is big for the smartphone space, and the other is big for the speech industry. I think they both had something to do with technology patents.

Google acquired Motorola. As everyone knows, Google has been wrapped up in a lot of legal feuds over Android. Android is certainly doing well, its competitors want to knock it down, and patent infringement seems to be the preferred means of fighting. Long established companies like Microsoft, RIM and Apple have had a lot of time to build a patent portfolio…on top of that they recently outbid Google on the Nortel patent acquisition. SO… Google has to beef up its patent portfolio quickly to fight back and eventually do what big companies do – agree to cross license and stop paying the law firms! Or maybe Google just wants a boatload of patents so they can be comfortable indemnifying all the Android users.

So at the end of July, Google bought a boatload (well over 1000) of patents from IBM (Nuance bought a bunch of patents from IBM as well focused on speech tech!)

Now Google buys MOTO. Here’s something really interesting. The price paid for Nortel was about $4.5B for 6000 patents (plus patents applied for etc). That’s about $750K/patent. Google underbid and didn’t get in on the deal. Google bought MOTO Mobility for $12.5B for a little over 17,000 patents… Just under $750K/patent! VERY INTERESTING…seems like $750K/patents is the going rate for large patent portfolios!!!!!

Specialized portfolios in speech technology are worth even more!

Nuance acquires Loquendo. I’m sure this wasn’t just for patents…it was taking out one of their only competitors for both SR and TTS, and Nuance got a GREAT price for a company with a lot of excellent technology. I have no idea how many patents Loquendo has…I think 7 in the US and probably a lot more in Europe. Let’s estimate that they had 35 patents total. At $75M, that would be around $2M per patent, which isn’t far off of the per-patent price Nuance paid for SVOX, who had 60-80 patents. The revenue multipliers seem pretty consistent too…SVOX was doing around $25M in sales and was bought for around 6x sales…likewise Loquendo was doing about $12.5M in sales and was bought for ABOUT SIX TIMES SALES. What does Nuance trade at? ABOUT SIX TIMES SALES. So what does that mean? Well you could argue that if Nuance pays less or equal to its revenue multiplier (6xsales) for an acquisition, then the patents essentially come free because the acquired revenues should immediately boost Nuance’s valuation by close to the purchase price.

I wonder if that’s how Nuance thinks about it. Then they wouldn’t be paying $2M for a patent or even $750K…they’d essentially get them for free and in the process build the biggest database of speech patents in the world.

Maybe Nuance’s strategy isn’t really about taking out competitors and buying customers through M&A, but maybe they want to own the majority of patents in the speech tech space. Nuance certainly hasn’t made money in using patents for lawsuits. Dave Grannan, Vlingo’s CEO was recently quoted as saying, ”We are happy to report that with this latest ruling, Nuance’s record remains perfect in patent infringement trials, they haven’t won any.” You go, Dave!

So why would Nuance want so many speech patents if they can’t make money in court? Well I’ve blogged earlier about their use of patent infringement in acquisitions. Maybe they are looking to be bought by a Google, Apple, or Microsoft…that patent portfolio could certainly do a lot in user experience fights. But if cross licensing agreements get worked out between the companies big enough to acquire Nuance, then where does that leave Nuance?

Well…without a lot of competition for sure!

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

I recently learned about 2 awards that Sensory has won over the past year. The contrast is in how we learned about them, and the different nature of these awards. It’s really amusing, so I thought I’d share my take.

Both awards were for our TrulyHandsfree™ Voice Control. One was for the significance of Sensory’s truly hands-free trigger in implementing speech recognition without using buttons, and the other was for Sensory’s chip-based implementation of a truly hands-free interface.

The first award came from Speech Technology Magazine. Sensory won their Star Performer award for 2011, and I didn’t even know we had been nominated. In fact, nobody ever told me that we had won; I found out really by chance (thanks, Bernie!) They only gave out four of these awards this year, and I’m honored and thrilled that Sensory won one of them. It’s really a testament to our team behind TrulyHandsfree… IT’S THE MOST AMAZING TECHNOLOGY. I sent kudos to Speech Tech for having the insight to understand the significance of this technology! Speech Technology Magazine has gotten so independent and non-self-serving in their awards process, that they didn’t even take the opportunity to call us and let us know! Now we know, so thanks again, Speech Tech!

In contrast…The second award came from a market research firm I’ll call the Cold Irishman. Why don’t I use their real name? Well I can’t or they might sue me. I received a call from their “Manager of IP and Copyrights” to congratulate me, and to let me know about their thoroughly independent and fair process that looked at the entire speech market and decided that Sensory stood out… blah blah blah…

I knew there was something funny going on by the guy’s title. Yeah you guessed it. To be able to tell people we won their award costs a certain price; you pay more the more you want to use it, and you can even pay more to go to an awards banquet. He offered me programs for as little as $10K, which went up in price to WAY more than that. One of the more expensive programs was that they’d make a video for us receiving the award with lots of praise from their esteemed analysts. So, I decided to go onto YouTube and see for myself how many hits last year’s award winners were getting…my memory said low double digits, but that didn’t seem possible (Sensory’s little home-made video’s often get thousands of hits.) Just for fun I looked just now at this year’s award winners – one of them had only 10 (yes TEN) hits. Most of them must have been employees… Pretty hefty price to stroke your own own ego and get almost nothing in return! I’ve always wondered who pays to be in Whoever’s Whatever? It’s probably the same CEO’s that pay to go to award dinners!

So…Many Thanks to Leonard Klie and Speech Technology Magazine…and Cold Irishman…thanks, but no thanks! Sensory deserves recognition for innovation in speech technologies based on our hard work, not on how much we pay to market it.

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

I have a new favorite toy. It’s Watson the Raccoon, one of Hallmark’s new Interactive Storybook and Story Buddy™ characters.

I used to have the time to buy every product that featured one of Sensory’s technologies. I have to admit I don’t do that much anymore, and as my kids have gotten older, I buy fewer and fewer toys in general, much less ones with speech recognition. Luckily I was visiting my dad, and he had purchased one out of curiosity.

For many years, my favorite Sensory-based toy was from the very early days of Sensory called Radar the Robot, from Fisher Price. I have fond memories of my kids imitating Radar, and also remember biking around Bali on my honeymoon, going for a night ride through the jungle by myself just to find a fax machine so I could send an agreement draft back to Fisher Price (Design Win for Radar!)

Sorry Radar…Watson has removed you from your pedestal. Watson now reigns supreme!

Hallmark’s Interactive Storybooks use Sensory’s NLP based processors with TrulyHandsfree™ Voice Control. As you read the book, the Story Buddy™ listens and interacts appropriate when it hears you say different phrases from the book.

I knew the concept was great when we first did Jingle the Husky Pup with Hallmark. I also knew that these products were selling really well, and I even knew that TrulyHandsfree™ Voice Control is the MOST AMAZING technology to ever come out of Sensory (Hey – I just got an email from the manager of one of the larger speech organizations in the world and he said “we keep trying to break your TrulyHandsfree™ 2.0 beta technology, but we just can’t seem to make it fail!”)

What I didn’t know is what an EXCELLENT job Hallmark does in story writing, character creation, and putting the whole thing together to make a really fun experience that really works! The book starts off with Watson wondering why grass grows up and rain falls down… I love that line!

Kudos to you Hallmark…now I gotta go buy a Watson for my lobby!

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

That’s what America’s most charismatic President used to say! I didn’t necessarily agree with Reagan’s politics, but I sure did like his presentation. Nuance’s Paul Ricci is kind of the inverse of that; a lot of people don’t like him, but it’s hard to argue with his politics (although I will later in this blog…)
Nuance does seem to perform remarkably well. They have an amazing patent position, and are quite highly valued by almost any financial metric you can apply, including their market cap (over $6B and near an all-time high), their revenue multiplier (5-6 range), as well as P/E over 2000 (and although fairly meaningless, it does show they are finally profitable using GAAP rather than their modified accounting policies!!!!)

I’ve never met Ricci. I’ve known a lot of people who have worked for him, with him, and against him. Everybody agrees he’s a tough guy, and I think most would also use words like ruthless and smart. A lot of people might even call him an asshole, and whether true or not, I don’t think he cares about that. He’s a competitive strategy gameplay kind of guy, and he’s done pretty well. However, he has a HUGE challenge being up against the likes of Google, Microsoft, and eventually Apple (let alone the smart little guys like Vlingo, Yap, Loquendo, etc.). But I digress…

I started this blog thinking about Nuance’s recent acquisition of SVOX. And I wanted to congratulate Nuance and Ricci for ACQUIRING SVOX WITHOUT SUING THEM. If I look back a ways (and I can look back VERY FAR!), Nuance (or the company formerly known as Lernout and Hauspie and then Scansoft) has at least 4 embedded speech recognition companies wrapped into it over the years. In rough chronological order: Voice Control Systems (VCS was probably the FIRST embedded speech company and the first and only embedded group to go public), Phillips Embedded Speech Division (I think they had acquired VCS for around $50M), Advanced Recognition Technologies, and Voice Signal Technologies. I believe Ricci was at the helm during the Philips embedded acquisition (this was the one closer to 2000 as opposed to the Philips Medical group a few years ago), ART, and VST. Interestingly, 2 of these 3 were lawsuit acquisitions. There are probably some inside stories about SVOX that I don’t know (e.g. threats of lawsuits??), but it appears that Nuance’s acquisitions of embedded companies are now down to 50% lawsuit driven. Thanks, Paul, you’re moving in the right direction!

OK, so what’s wrong with suing the companies you want to acquire? It probably does lower their price and reduce competitive bidding. Setting aside the legal and moral issues, there is one huge issue that’s clear- If you want to hold onto your star employees and technologists, you need to treat them well. Everyone understands who the “stars” are - they are the 10% of the workforce that contribute to 90% of the innovation. They are not going to stick around unless they are treated right, and starting off a relationship by calling them thieves is not a good way to court a long term relationship.

For example, there’s been a lot of press lately about the Vlingo/Nuance situation and how Ricci offered the top 3 employee/founders $5M each to sell Vlingo (plus a bundle of money for Vlingo!) Well, Mike Phillips used to be Nuance’s CTO (through acquisition of Speechworks)…so wouldn’t it have been more valuable to KEEP Mike there than BUY him back? The “other” Mike…Mike Cohen is Google’s head of speech. He FOUNDED Nuance (well, the company formerly known as Nuance!) and left to join Google, and of course this caused a lawsuit…think either of the Mike’s (two of the smartest speech technologists in the industry) would ever go back to Nuance? Google has managed to hold onto Cohen, so it’s not just an issue of the best people leaving big companies because “little companies innovate.” I’ve also seen the recent rumor mill about Nuance’s Head of Smart Phone Architecture leaving for Apple…
By the way, you gotta treat customers nicely too! Strong arm tactics on customers and competitors might close short term deals, but I think there are better approaches in the long run.

So it’s the personnel and customer thing that Nuance is missing out on in their competitive gameplay strategy, and my hope is that SVOX’s acquisition represents a significant change in how Nuance does business!

As a point in contrast, Sensory has acquired only one company in our history – Fluent Speech Technologies (and no, we didn’t sue them first.) This was a group that spun out of the former Oregon Graduate Institute back in the 1990’s. We saw a demo of theirs back in 1997-1998, and thought the technology was great. They offered to sell us the speech recognition technology (not the company), so they could focus on animation opportunities, but we had NO INTEREST in that. We wanted the people that made the technology, not the technology itself. That’s how our Oregon office was born; we acquired the company with the people. The office is now about as big as our headquarters (and some of our people in Silicon Valley have even moved up there!) By the way, ALL the technologists that came with that acquisition are still with us after 12 years, and we’ve kept a very friendly relationship with the former OGI as well.

Time for a breather…Yeah, I do long blogs….if you see a short one, which might start appearing, it’s probably a “ghostwriter” helping me out….

So let’s look at Nuance’s acquisition of SVOX. Why did Nuance acquire them?

1. SVOX was for sale. I don’t mean this tongue in cheek. I suspect SVOX proactively approached Nuance (and probably Google and others as well) to buy them. If you look at SVOX’s Board (many of whom are their investors), it’s a bunch of guys that ran retail empires and huge organizations, so they probably got tired (in the midst of the economic downturn of the last few years) of waiting.
2. SVOX was affordable. I don’t mean cheap, and I don’t know yet what Nuance paid, but my guess is Nuance probably paid in the 4-7x sales range. SVOX as a wildass guess was doing in the $20-$30M year range, so Nuance might have paid $80-$210M…quite affordable for Nuance. Since Nuance is traded at around 5-6x sales, that’s not too bad from a revenue multiplier perspective, and I’d guess SVOX has been profitable so the deal should be accretive to Nuance. If the numbers come out and Nuance paid more than $200M (their prior embedded acquisition of VST was about $300M!), that means there was some serious bidding going on – and probably with Google, Microsoft, or Apple (The Big Guys) in the mix, since they all could have used SVOX technology and patents.
3. SVOX had Patents. SVOX acquired/merged with Siemens’ speech group a few years back, and with this merger came “60 patent families.” That’s a lot of patents, especially when you add on the patents that SVOX got before and after the merger with Siemens. This will continue to fuel Nuance’s tremendous patent position. My opinion is that it was quite a mistake for the Big Guys - especially Apple- to pass up this combination of talent, technology and patents…they could have easily outbid Nuance !
4. Customer acquisition. OK, this was probably Nuance’s primary motivation, and probably the reason that Nuance would outbid companies wanting SVOX for “in-house” solutions. SVOX had a lot of deals in automotive and mobile handsets! They were very strong in small-to-medium footprint (1-50MB) TTS, and were making fast inroads with their speech recognition. Nuance loves to buy customers. SVOX had customers.
5. Keeping Apple and Google from Acquiring SVOX. It’s not often that Apple loses, but I think they lost on this one. SVOX would have been a really cheap way for Apple to make a big move into speech with an in-house technology. It’s going to be hard to grow it all internally, but what a nice bootstrap SVOX would have been in patents and technologies! Google is one of SVOX’s customers for TTS (Hey - Nuance was one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance that developed Android!), but with Google’s hiring and acquisitions in the speech space, the writing was on the wall for SVOX to go the way of Nuance, and get designed out of Android for Google’s internal solutions. By keeping SVOX away from Apple and Google, Nuance has the opportunity to keep two huge customers (i.e. Google from SVOX and Apple) from jumping ship…but I still think it will happen eventually!
6. Automotive Industry Contacts. I read the press release about advancing “the proliferation of voice in the automotive market”, and accelerating “the development of new voice capabilities that enable natural, conversational interactions” and about SVOX supplying the Client for Client/Server hybrid solutions. None of that market-speak makes my list. I think the technologies that SVOX had were pretty redundant to what Nuance has. SVOX had better customer relations and accounts in automotive…that was really the driver!

Anyways…I suspect the acquisition was a good deal for Nuance and its investors, and probably a GREAT deal for SVOX and its investors. Nuance’s market price didn’t seem to move much, but maybe it will once the price is disclosed. I commend and encourage Nuance to cut the lawsuits…one of them could bite back a lot worse than the pain of losing employees!

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com

I’ve been in the speech technology field since the beginning and I have to say, there has never been a more exciting time for this space. Recently some of the biggest names in technology have announced the integration of voice capabilities into their products. At this year’s E3 conference, Microsoft stated that the next version of it’s Xbox Live will include voice commands. Also, it appears Apple will integrate speech-to-text input in the iOS 5. Android 2.1 already has speech-to-text built in to its mobile platform. And just this week, Google announced that voice search capability is coming to the Google.com search box (how cool?!)

All of these developments will be exposing more and more mainstream users to the benefits of the voice user interface on a daily basis. Consumers demand so much from personal devices and if they expect to control them via voice, they’ll want to do so from beginning to end (no button pressing, ever). This is where Sensory comes in. Our Truly Hands-Free technology is better than anything out there and lets manufacturers add a hands-free trigger to the interface so the user can give the device a call to action without ever lifting a finger. No need to take eyes off the road to make a call from a hands-free car kit, no need to dirty up your tablet or computer by using messy (cooking) hands to call up a recipe, no need to disturb your comfortable state of rest to set an alarm clock, etc.

I can say from where I sit, many manufacturers see the value of a voice user interface that includes a hands-free trigger phrase. Expect to see the makers of automotive products, smartphones, home entertainment products and more using Sensory’s technologies in the coming year. And be sure to stay tuned for exciting enhancements and innovations in store for our Truly Hands-Free technology, as well.

Todd
sensoryblog@sensoryinc.com