Written by IBM Corporation

Nuance Communications, Inc., a leading provider of speech solutions, and IBM, a pioneer in speech technology, have announced that the companies 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 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 organization 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 optimization; 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.

"As businesses and governments aim to operate more intelligently and efficiently, the full impact of speech technology is just emerging. Working with Nuance and its extensive array of complementary products and services, we are accelerating the opportunity to deliver exciting innovations to clients in key industries," said Frank Kern, IBM senior vice president, Global Business Services. "Teaming with Nuance means great things for organizations and manufacturers that rely on speech technology to advance their own business objectives and provide exciting new services for their customers."

"The potential innovations in speech technology that result from Nuance and IBM's combined efforts, expertise and resources are boundless," said Paul Ricci, chairman and CEO, Nuance. "Together we can achieve new benchmarks in design, usability and technical excellence by collaborating with IBM's renowned speech teams and by serving as IBM's preferred partner for speech solutions. And, this initiative enables us to deliver on our joint mission to proliferate the power of speech across a vast number of applications and services."

For more information on the previously announced technology and IP agreement between Nuance IBM in January, please see the press release "Nuance and IBM Establish Agreement to Advance Innovative Speech Solutions" on January 15, 2009.

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