Nuance to Acquire Tegic from AOL

by: admin Friday, June 22nd, 2007

Rating: multimodal, man

I knew that Tegic was up for sale in March; but I didn’t realise that Nuance was a prime contender. Nuance is certainly being very bullish and is getting a reputation for itself as multimodal leader with its acquisitions (Voice Signal, BeVocal…) in the mobile space (see recent articles below).

In brief multimodal search is a driver in the industry and Nuance has cornered this market. Tegic is already available in billions of devices around the world it might be an access point or connector for Nuance to push its services wider globally. Voice service, ad-services, voice and text commands are all emerging but are no way near ripe.
The implications for AOL are slightly different but the company is shifting its corporate positioning.

This is a big one and a full SWOT analysis will be available in the next issue of The Mobile Search Analyst.
Podcasts with Tegic’s Eric Collins and AOL’s Bill Schwebel are available here.

Related articles:
http://pushingthebarrier.typepad.com/pushing_the_barrier/2007/06/voicesingal_sig.html
http://pushingthebarrier.typepad.com/pushing_the_barrier/2007/05/nuance_to_buy_v.html
http://pushingthebarrier.typepad.com/pushing_the_barrier/2007/05/nuance_voice_co.html
http://pushingthebarrier.typepad.com/pushing_the_barrier/2007/03/nuance_speech_b.html
http://pushingthebarrier.typepad.com/pushing_the_barrier/2007/02/nuance_buys_bev.html
http://pushingthebarrier.typepad.com/pushing_the_barrier/2007/01/nuance_tops_one.html
http://pushingthebarrier.typepad.com/pushing_the_barrier/2006/12/nuance_buys_mob.html