Nuance buys Voicebox Technologies, scooping up speech-recognition and natural-language ...
Summary
It’s the latest indication of the booming market for conversational speech technology and voice assistants, driven by new types of devices and the rise of artificial intelligence.Voicebox supplied behind-the-scenes voice technology used in a variety of applications and devices, but it was competing in a larger market defined and controlled in recent years by tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft.The market is fueled as companies add new voice technologies, specifically conversational assistants, to a wide variety of devices and services.Voicebox made major job cuts in January 2017 due to a “combination of unforeseen circumstances,” related in part to the Galaxy Note 7 discontinuation.Two months prior, the company announced that it had leased a new office in Bellevue, totaling nearly 67,400 square feet, to accommodate what it described at the time as its growing staff.