Nuance unveils voicemail-to-text service

Nuance has announced a new voicemail-to-text service, which utilizes speech recognition technology alongside a team of in-house transcriptionists. PhoneTag and SpinVox already offer similar services and have gained large subscriber bases. Despite increasing competition, however, the market is in its infancy and pricing will help to differentiate vendors.

Nuance has recently released a voicemail-to-text service, broadening its solution portfolio in the mobile space. The company is utilizing its Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition engine, together with a large team of over 3,000 in-house transcriptionists to provide this hosted service. The technology and staff to provide this service were readily available: Nuance already uses both Dragon NaturallySpeaking and transcriptionists to provide medical transcription for the healthcare industry, which meant that little development time or technology investment was needed to bring this new solution to market. Nuance has a strong reputation for its speech technology and as a large professional services organization with many vendor relationships which it can use to promote the adoption of its voicemail to text service.

Nuance already works closely with mobile device manufacturers such as Research In Motion, providing dictation and command and control functionality for BlackBerry, Nokia and Treo users, among others. The mobile speech business represents a good proportion of Nuance's revenues and is a fast growing sector. Expanding its offerings in this area should help Nuance to stay ahead of its competitors in the embedded speech market.

Nuance is slow to market, with PhoneTag and SpinVox already offering a similar service

PhoneTag, SpinVox, CallWave and even Apple pose a threat to Nuance in the voicemail market. These companies already offer voicemail-to-text services; Apple's iPhone in particular includes a 'Visual Voicemail' feature where the user can view a list of voice messages (although Apple doesn't currently have speech-to-text capabilities as part of this service, it has the ability to develop its solution to incorporate this). PhoneTag, formerly SimulScribe, is Nuance's leading competitor in the US, having gained partnerships with a number of US carriers. It also offers unlimited storage capacity for messages and provides the audio file as an attachment to emails.

UK based company SpinVox has gained a large subscriber base, reported to be at least six million. The company has developed its own speech technology which it uses alongside transcriptionists in a similar way to Nuance. Although SpinVox is a small private company, it is rapidly growing and announced in March that it had secured $100 million in funding from a number of investors. It has partnerships with carriers including Vodafone Spain, Alltel in the US and Telstra in Australia. SpinVox is offering its service in a number of languages and supports regional dialects in the UK. It has also taken into consideration mobile behavioral differences: in Spain, for example, mobile voicemail is not used extensively because it often costs extra. For these customers, SpinVox provides the option to leave a missed call message or the ability to speak a message which will be sent as text, differentiating the company from its competitors.

The unified messaging industry is growing rapidly and represents a significant opportunity

Although the technology to send an audio file from business voicemail into an email inbox has been available for a number of years, vendors are now selling it as part of unified communications suites. The unified communications market has seen a number of changes over the last couple of years, with Microsoft and IBM providing presence and messaging capabilities alongside traditional communications vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Siemens and Nortel. Adoption of unified communications and messaging is rapidly increasing: as such, forming alliances with unified communications vendors will be important to gain market share in the voicemail-to-text market. SpinVox has already responded to this by becoming part of Avaya's developer community and integrating its solution with Avaya's unified messaging.

Partnerships and pricing are the key to success

SpinVox and PhoneTag have a head start on Nuance: SpinVox has the backing of investors and is gaining traction in the unified communications and Web 2.0 markets, while PhoneTag already has a wide customer base and partnerships with several carriers. However, Nuance is a dominant player in the speech recognition market, with a strong brand. It already has relationships with a number of systems integrators and mobile companies, including Research In Motion.

That said, Nuance may have underestimated PhoneTag's and SpinVox's strong market positions. Both are specialist providers dedicated to providing voicemail-to-text services, whereas for Nuance this is possibly just another string to its bow. However, at this early stage in the market, there are many customers to be gained and much room for growth. SpinVox is likely to dominate the European market, while Nuance and PhoneTag are strong in the US. Price will be the differentiating factor for Nuance. If it can provide its service at a cheaper rate than its competitors, it will be more attractive to end-users and quickly gain market share. Winning carrier deals and integrating the service with unified communications platforms are also vital for success as voicemail-to-text technology brings more value and potential customers through partnerships.

Aphrodite Brinsmead

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