Nuance, IBM Join Forces To Develop & Market Speech Solns

Nuance Communications, a provider of speech solutions, and IBM, have entered into a comprehensive Joint Initiative Agreement to further accelerate innovation and advanced speech recognition solutions for enterprises, consumers and partners worldwide. This new partnership builds upon the technology and IP collaboration between the companies announced earlier this year.

As part of the Joint Initiative Agreement, IBM has named Nuance its Preferred Business Partner for speech technologies and related professional services to complement IBM’s Industry Solutions portfolio. The companies will collaborate to address and fulfill the needs of customers in ten industries: Automotive, Banking, Electronics, Energy and Utilities, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Insurance, Media and Entertainment, Retail, Telecommunications, and Travel and Transportation.

IBM and Nuance expect to expand the opportunity for deploying speech technologies and make it easier than ever for enterprises and individuals to engage in commerce, access information and collaborate in broad application domains like customer care, unified messaging and mobile search. Specifically, the companies will concentrate their efforts in three key areas:

- The companies will forge a tight, complementary relationship between Nuance’s advanced speech technologies and related professional services, and IBM’s Global Business Services organisation and Web application server capabilities for traditional and VoIP network infrastructures;

- For each industry above, Nuance and IBM will collaborate to fulfill the customer requirements for advanced, automated customer self-service and agent optimisation solutions; and,

- In automotive and telecommunications, the companies will collaborate to address the needs of in-vehicle and on-device OEMs that seek to incorporate next-generation technologies that focus on voice access to device control, search and media management.