When all else fails, it resorts to the courts (where the number of intellectual property suits regarding speech procesing and the mobile user interface are not worth enumerating). The rap on Nuance of late – in the Speech Gospel According to Vlingo – is that the company (as the largest, diversified provider of speech processing technologies) would rather acquire its competition than take it on in the marketplace. Nuance will be well-advised to take stock of the full-range of SVOX’s technology solutions and their “fit” with all of its mobile and enterprise offerings. The company is profitable largely because of successes in licensing its multi-lingual TTS to a multiplicity of solutions providers, mostly “embedded” implementations, but also including Google (for Google Translate). Its only peer in product range (other than Nuance) is Loquendo, which is the speech-processing subsidiary of Telecom Italia. Over the past eleven years it has shown great creativity as it broadened its product offerings, adding ASR (automated speech recognition), acoustic processing (to isolate speech from background noise), dialogue management (bordering on artificial intelligence) and voice biometrics. SVOX was founded in 2000 as a two-person company specializing in text-to-speech rendering. This is a signal event in the global battle for supremacy taking shape among Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM and AT&T, among other technology giants that recognize that the future hinges on providing a highly-personalized user interface that mates speech technologies, “artificial intelligence,” embedded technologies and “cloud-based,” dynamic information and resources that comprise a consistent, “predictive” multimodal user interface. According to a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on June 16, Nuance paid former stockholders of SVOX €87 million (approximately $125 million), of which €57 million was paid in cash at the closing €8.3 million is payable in cash or shares of Nuance common stock on the first anniversary of the closing and another €21.7 million is payable in cash or shares of Nuance common stock on or before December 31, 2012.
Microsoft SAPI 5.On June 16th, Nuance completed its acquisition of SVOX AG, the Switzerland-based provider of a full range of speech processing software. Microsoft Simplified Chinese voice (Male) L&H TTS3000 English voices: Michael and Michelle Microsoft English voices: Mary, Mike and Sam
Free SAPI5 Voices for Windows 98/NT4/2000/XP Language
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