14 DAY TRIAL // After battling it out in courts over patent infringement claims, Nuance and Vlingo came to terms this week by deciding to combine their forces for an undisclosed figure.
Nuance once tried to convince a court that Vlingo’s vision of speech recognition was too much like their own.
The jury, however, found that Vlingo wasn’t really infringing on any Nuance patents. Yet Nuance wasn’t going to give up the fight, and promised to hit Vlingo back with pending actions.
In the meanwhile, the two voice-recognition companies kissed and made up, according to a report by the WSJ-owned All Things D, which reveals that Nuance is now buying Vlingo.
Described by CEO of Vlingo Dave Grannan as a “a good outcome,” the move likely comes as a result of Apple adopting Siri as the basis of its own voice-powered applications.
“Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services,” Nuance mobile unit head Mike Thompson said in a statement.
Grannan said “Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding. As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers.”
In an interview with 9to5mac, Siri co-founder Norman Winarsky said the original Siri application used Vlingo as its speech recognition driver.
With Siri in Apple’s hands later on, the service switched to Nuance, which Apple believed offered better voice recognition and interpretation.
“Theoretically, if a better speech recognition comes along (or Apple buys one), they could likely replace Nuance without too much trouble,” Winarsky said at the time of the interview.