BURLINGTON, Mass., – August 15, 2011 — Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced an agreement to acquire Loquendo, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Telecom Italia. The combination of Nuance and Loquendo’s innovations will advance the proliferation of voice-enabled solutions and accelerate the development of new capabilities that will deliver natural, conversational interactions between consumers and the contact center, automobiles, mobile phones, and other consumer devices.
Loquendo provides a range of speech technologies for telephony, mobile, automotive, embedded and desktop solutions in 32 languages with 76 voices. Loquendo’s text-to-speech (TTS), automatic speech recognition (ASR) and voice biometrics solutions empower people to interact with technology in the most natural way possible – using their voice – to create a compelling customer experience and save businesses millions of dollars each year. Loquendo speech solutions are deployed in more than 20 million devices worldwide, in embedded, automotive and mobile environments. Its technologies power millions of calls every day in telecommunications and enterprise markets worldwide.
The combined organization offers a broad, high quality portfolio of voice and language solutions that includes TTS, ASR and voice biometrics solutions. In addition, the acquisition enhances language coverage for network-based and embedded customers, and strengthens Nuance’s global channel partnerships which drive the adoption of speech-enabled solutions worldwide. The transaction is expected to close in late September 2011.
“The penetration of Loquendo’s offerings and the company’s positive industry recognition will serve as a catalyst in expanding our market reach and our voice and language portfolio,” said Steve Chambers, chief marketing officer and head of the enterprise division, Nuance Communications. “Together, we will provide a range of best-of-breed solutions, delivering natural, conversational interactions across a number of growing segments that will initially include enterprise, mobile and automotive – with a significant opportunity to expand these offerings into areas such as Europe and Latin America.”Through this acquisition, Nuance intends to expand its operations and accelerate growth in four key areas:
Advanced Voice Solutions for New and Emerging Markets – Nuance and Loquendo’s combined technologies will advance groundbreaking voice capabilities through robust TTS, ASR and voice biometrics offerings – broadening Nuance’s global footprint especially in Europe and Latin America. Strong Global Customer and Partner Relationships – The acquisition provides Nuance’s and Loquendo’s customers and partners access to the industry’s largest and most experienced voice and language portfolio. Loquendo’s technical expertise and talent, combined with Nuance’s global resources and market strength, will accelerate a robust product and services roadmap to deliver state-of-the-art solutions for our customers and partners.Robust Language Support –Loquendo has strong proficiency in Latin languages, which provides Nuance with the broadest language support in the industry with the goal to drive natural, conversational interactions across a number of industry segments in the user’s preferred language. Innovation – Both companies offer very sophisticated voice-enabled technologies. Together, Nuance and Loquendo will be able to accelerate innovation through a new center of excellence for speech research, based in Turin, Italy. This expands upon Nuance’s existing research and development facilities in Sunnyvale, CA, Burlington, MA, Aachen, Germany, Merelbeke, Belgium, Zurich, Switzerland and Montreal, Quebec.“The adoption of speech technology is being driven by the increasing comfort in the use of speech by consumers, resulting in the demand for fully voice-enabled experiences across many industry segments,” said Davide Franco, chief executive officer and chairman of the board, Loquendo. “By combining our technology and amazing employees with Nuance’s robust capabilities and market strength, we look forward to continued success with our partners and customers.”
