Vendredi 04 avril 2008, Visite de Nuance avec Mira Elizabeth Woods, Senior Director of Marketing & Strategy.

Activité : Computer sofware technology company
Date de création : 1994
Effectif US / Monde :3500
Chiffre d’affaires : $613 million (2007)
Contact : Mira Elizabeth Woods, Senior Director of Marketing & Strategy
Site Internet : http://www.nuance.com/

Historique de la société

Nuance was founded in 1994 as a spinoff of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI)’s Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory, and thus existed concurrently with ScanSoft for the decade prior to their 2005 merger. Based in Menlo Park, CA, Nuance deployed their first commercial large-scale speech application in 1996, a market ScanSoft entered in 2001 through a series of acquisitions. Because of Nuance and ScanSoft’s decade-long co-existence, and particularly that they competed in the
same market for several years prior to their merger, each company’s history should be considered separate up until September 2005. Nuance’s products were computer telephony applications, Voice XML (VXML), SIP services, and automated call steering. Deployed in call centers and the like, Nuance applications ran on WindowsNT-based and Solaris operating systems, and commonly relied on Dialogic boards for the telephony hardware. Unlike ScanSoft, Nuance did not actively acquire companies prior to their merger.

Produit(s)/Services de la société

Consumer products
PaperPort
OmniPage
Dragon NaturallySpeaking
PDF Converter
ETI-Eloquence and RealSpeak speech engines.

Business Products & Services
Medical Transcription
Speech Recognition Engine
Call Steering
Automated Directory Assistance.
Embedded Speech Recognition
Text to Speech
Voice Authentication
Embedded Text Input (T9 and XT9)
Embedded Text-based Mobile Search (T9 Nav)

Modèle(s) économique(s) / Réseau de distribution

ad-supported business model has created a compelling new alternative in the directory assistance (DA) industry, as both consumers and advertisers rapidly embrace the service. Powered by Nuance’s automated DA solutions, Jingle has processed more than 170 million calls since the free 411 service’s launch in September 2005, with a monthly call volume that has increased more than 300 percent over the past year.

Nuance has both B to B and B to C distribution channel and business model. From one side, the company sells OCR and PDF creator software for the end user. This distribution channel is dedicated to the B to C. It does not represent the main activity but with the last versions updated, this new technology has allowed the brand to be top rated and absorb the main part of the market share. The technology developed by Nuance allows the company to be limitless in Business model application and adaptability. Health care, automotive, GSM, IT, the domains are large and some of them are still not covered and discovered. With all those alternatives, Nuance is able to model is main product in order to provide the right information everywhere only by pushing one button.

Concurrents

- IBM WebSphere Voice Server
- Loquendo
- Microsoft Speech Server
- SVOX Text-to-speech solutions

Questions posées (synthèse)

A lot of technical questions were asked and summing up those questions would be pointless because all information about the products have been delivered in the former questions. As for the other main questions, Nuance did not pronounce for the future strategy saying only that all good propositions would be taken into account. One of the minor but future features will be the possibility to use voice recognition technology in Canada and 20 other countries. The aim is to stretch the market to Europe
in order to have new market share and improve the technology by acknowledging new languages.
A partnership with Microsoft was once quoted but they have their own technology, which far from being as sharp as Nuance one, so the idea was refused. A long and good demonstration of voice recognition was made and the application of this technology is pretty impressive as all is done by just pushing one button.