Hosted IVR

September 18, 2012

Nuance Acquires Ditech Networks, Expands Voice Portfolio

By Rory Lidstone
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Nuance Communications (News - Alert), a provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers, today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Ditech Networks. This acquisition makes a lot of sense as Ditech's voice processing solutions — Voice Quality Assurance (VQA) and PhoneTag voicemail-to-text — really complements Nuance's portfolio of voice offerings.

The demand for voice products that work seamlessly is on the rise and Ditech Networks' (News - Alert) portfolio of voice technologies will help Nuance in continuing to set the pace for innovation in the voice and language solutions sector. Ditech Networks' PhoneTag service, in particular, brings important customer and complementary technologies to Nuance's Dragon Voice to Text Services.

“The world’s most innovative carriers and unified communications providers work with Nuance to take advantage of the revolution in voice recognition, and nowhere is this more evident than in our voicemail to text and call completion businesses, where billions of calls are converted into easily read text and email messages — a powerful solution for today’s messaging-centric world,” said John Pollard, vice president and general manager of Voice to Text Services at Nuance Mobile. “Acquiring Ditech Networks’ voice technologies will help Nuance continue to drive these next-generation services.”

Nuance is reportedly paying $1.45 per share in cash to acquire Ditech Networks, totaling an enterprise value of about $22.5 million. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies.

Nuance Communications in early August unveiled Nina, a multimodal virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps which allows companies to add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to existing iOS and Android (News - Alert) mobile apps. Combining Nuance's speech recognition, text-to-speech, voice biometrics and natural language understanding technology all hosted in the cloud, Nina delivers an interactive user experience that can even identify who is speaking.

More recently, the company announced the availability of its Dragon Assistant Beta, a voice assistant for Intel (News - Alert) Ultrabooks.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.

Edited by Brooke Neuman