Ah Samsung. They just have to do things their own way, don’t they? Just when you thought that perhaps Google Now’s voice recognition services were fantastically functional, the news breaks that the Korean giant is considering creating a speech recognition service of its own.
Nuance Communications is a speech recognition specialist, and Samsung is currently one of its major clients (Apple is another, who already uses its tech for Siri). Nuance is now putting itself up for sale, if the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, and rather unsurprisingly Samsung is at the front of the list of suspected suitors.
With a massive recent share rise of 10% (thanks largely to these rumours), Nuance now sits at a valuation of $6 billion. That’s a lot of money for any company to drop, even Samsung. It does help that just last year the company made a point of stating that it has a $60 billion cash reserve it’s looking to spend on acquisitions, though.
With Samsung looking to expand its Tizen operating system then their own purpose-built speech recognition service could be rather a big deal. Not only that, but Nuance offers a range of other services too, like virtual assistants (a Siri rival and a Cortana rival?), text-to-speech and visualisation tools.