Nuance and Jingle form a strategic partnership

by: admin Monday, August 27th, 2007

Rating: jingle, jangle, jingle jangling ~~nuisance~~ …nuance.

Nuance has formed a strategic partnership with Jingle Networks the voice search operator for the 1-800-FREE 411 directory services solution. From now on Jingle will use technology from Nuance to improve the FREE411 service.

But that isn’t all. Advertising also comes to play and Nuance will also now become a marketer for the Jingle Ad Platform offering audio ads to its services.

From the press release
“Combining Nuance’s best-in-industry speech recognition platform with our audio ad serving platform provides the highest quality consumer experience at the lowest overall cost. This combination is the only advertising supported directory assistance platform which has successfully scaled, supplying more than 1.5 million speech enabled audio ads per day,” said Scott Kliger, founder and chief technology officer, Jingle Networks. “We tested numerous voice recognition solutions and determined that the Nuance Voice Platform for Directory Assistance provided the highest overall automation rates for business name and business category search enabling 1-800-FREE411 to deliver the best overall consumer experience. We look forward to deepening our relationship with Nuance such that Jingle ad serving capabilities complement the Nuance Mobile platform for each company’s global customer base.

“We know that continually improving the quality of the consumer experience and increasing automation rates is a key driver for the ongoing success of Jingle’s business model and rapid growth,” said Michael Thompson, vice president and general manager, mobile search and communications, Nuance. “As a company, we are committed to serving the goals of our customers, like Jingle, which is recognized by the depth and breadth of this relationship.”

What we think?
Nuance already has the ability to provide its own audio advertising from its purchases of VoiceSignal and Mobile Voice Control so adding Jingle Networks to field is a bit strange. But as Nuance continues to build and grow these forms of strategic partnership might be vital as ROI after a shopping spree of very expensive acquisitions remains thin.

Jingle is also a market leader in the directory space and this directory voice market is expected to mushroom over the next few years. In fact, Jingle has already hit a milestone in processing 250 million calls and apparently saving USD 400 million in 411 fees since September 2005. So, Jingle has an ad network that is working and is successful.

Nuance doesn’t. But it’s voice technology is obviously a big enough carrot to make a strategic partnership necessary for both parties. Perhaps the AdMob Voice Signal partnership is now redundent?

Please see The Mobile Search Analyst for a comprehensive analysis of Nuance.