IBM and Nuance team up for speech technology

Nuance Communications and href="http://www.dqweek.com/IBM-launches-4-new-CoEs-in-Rajasthan">IBM
announced
that the companies recently entered into a five-year joint-research
initiative designed to advance next-generation natural language
speech technologies. Leveraging Nuance and IBM's research and
development expertise, the initiative is designed to expand the
global use of speech technology and set new benchmarks in design,
usability and technical excellence.

IBM and Nuance have long focused on
speech technology to create and facilitate more meaningful
interactions between humans and machines, and among people. Today,
businesses and consumers alike can easily exploit the technology to
communicate naturally and intuitively. Together, IBM and Nuance
intend to further enhance these mass market speech interface
solutions to increasingly resemble human-to-human interaction,
whether in the car or home, on a mobile device, PC and telephone, or
within settings such as customer service, healthcare and many others.

"Our relationship with Nuance
demonstrates how IBM is applying its deep research skills and assets
to help its collaborators and their clients address some of the
world's most formidable and exciting technical challenges,” said
Dr John E Kelly III, Senior VP and Director, IBM Research. "Combining
our technical talent with the expertise of companies like Nuance, we
can create transformational technologies that hold promise to make
the world work better," he added.

“Speech technology already enables
highly intuitive interactions, but there is still significant
potential for the development and availability of next-generation
speech solutions that allow people to communicate with machines in a
natural, unconstrained fashion,” said Paul Ricci, Chairman and CEO,
Nuance. “The expanded collaboration between Nuance and IBM will
deliver an inspiring portfolio of speech innovations that can
accelerate the proliferation of speech across global industries. With
IBM and Nuance working together, our objectives are within reach and
we are well on our way to the day when people will interact with
machines just as they would with another person,” he added.

The latest collaboration complements
two other agreements between the companies to embark on joint
projects. Last year, IBM named Nuance its Preferred Business Partner
for speech technologies and related professional services, aimed at
complementing IBM's Industry Solutions portfolio. The companies
also entered into a licensing and technical services agreement. The
recent agreement announced focuses on conducting joint research, the
results of which will be commercialized by Nuance.