confirmed the story VentureBeat broke earlier this morning, that it has acquired voice-to-text company SpinVox for $102 million. Of that, $66 million will be in cash, the rest in stock. 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 its speech recognition service offerings. Nuance has a market value of $4.45 billion. It cut its net loss to $12m from $30m in the year to September as sales rose 9% to $950m.
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: