Nuance, Who Are Responsible for Siri’s Backbone, Buys Vlingo
News has broken today that Vlingo has agreed to sell to Nuance for an undisclosed amount of money. Nuance, as you may know, is the driving force behind many voice recognition applications on mobile and desktop including yours truly – Siri. With their purchase of Vlingo it would appear that Nuance will make a very strong push into this market though we’re not yet sure in which way.
Nuance deals in both direct-to-consumer sales as well as business to business sales, offering their engine for licensing to application developers and OEMs who want to enable natural language dictation features for their users.
We’re not sure if Vlingo will continue to offer their services as-is which include free mobile applications and applications integrated into OEM products (namely Samsung’s Galaxy S II series) or if the brand will eventually be evaporated into the big Nuance cloud.
Either way, we’re excited to see what these two could be working on for the future of voice-enabled actions because let’s face it – everyone wants Siri even if they don’t know it. [via GigaOM]