Nuance Continues Its Encroachment Into Mobile

I've asserted for a while that Nuance is a sleeping mobile industry giant. Now we have two more announcements.

Last week Nuance announced a deal with T-Mobile USA to provide a multichannel customer support system. Now Nokia and Nuance are announcing a multi-year agreement for both speech and predictive text joint development. That's both its speech and Tegic lines of business. I imagine the T9 Discovery Tool will be part of it.

In theory, they will be developing a framework for community developer involvement. This could be a good thing, but I am worried that Nuance's competitive position will be completely dominant. We'll all be using Nuance speech tools.

(Side note: one of my earliest jobs was with IBM, working on their ViaVoice dictation product. As a result, I now have a variety of speech UI patents. We had two competitors, Kurzweil and Dragon Naturally Speaking. Kurzweil is now out of business, and ViaVoice and Dragon are owned by Nuance.)