Recently, speech recognition giant Nuance acquired TouchCommerce, a customer service solution provider, for US$215 million.
In response to the acquisition, the outsiders stated that the advantages of Nuance and TouchCommerce are complementary. The advantages of the former are voice recognition and semantic processing technologies. The latter has experience in customer service solutions. TouchCommerce's online and offline service data can provide targeted data training for Nuance. The combination of the two will help further improve the intelligence and application of artificial intelligence customer service.
There is a question here as to why Nuance, originally a pure voice technology provider, switched to commercial products and launched enterprise service solutions.
Nuance has experienced numerous ups and downs over the past ten years: Apple, Google, and Samsung have been held in the palm of their hand, and the majority of voice product companies pay tribute to them. After that, Nuance has repeatedly experienced market crashes, technical bottlenecks, and customers. Losses, departure tides, missed best selling times, etc., ultimately have to be transformed from technology providers who only focus on longitudinal deep plowing algorithms to companies that have horizontally expanded solutions for various industries.
 "Nuance addiction" and "Nuance phobia" 
Lei Fengnet (search "Lei Feng Net" public concern) has repeatedly reported on Nuance's in-depth articles, pointing out that Nuance was first known to everyone due to their cooperation with Apple. After Siri, who was known as the next-generation interactive system, adopted their voice technology, the company, whose name was not seen and stunned, was instantly exposed by major media. In fact, before cooperating with Apple, they have already maintained cooperative relations with a number of well-known manufacturers. Their technology is used in products such as mobile phones, televisions, and automobiles. Samsung's voice assistant, S-Voice, also uses Nuance's technology.
In terms of major customers, Nuance has Apple, Samsung, Nintendo and other companies, because the entire voice technology market Nuance family dominance, technology is far more than similar competitors, which makes the customer base are very dependent on them. Nuance, who is a big customer, has acquired many smaller competitors than its size.
According to the US Business Weekly, Nuance has acquired more than 40 competing companies since 2000. Nuance’s CEO, Ricci, is very inclined to use litigation to weaken those innovative competitors in order to acquire them at very low prices or to bankrupt them. Dave Grannan, the CEO of startup Vlingo, publicly stated:
Competing with Nuance is like infectious disease. We are always in the direct competition with them, but when you think that life is full of beauty, hey! This is the end of a good day.
McCue, the former CEO of another start-up Tellme, once mentioned that many companies can't withstand the pressure of Nuance and finally succumb to it, and that such things are still happening.
At that time, Nuance had the absolute status and right to speak in the industry, and any company associated with it had to surrender to it, and the giants courteously gave it three points.
However, unconsciously, this voice giant is facing an unprecedented crisis, but he quietly do not know.
 Voice Empire CrumblingNuance has faced many fatal problems at the same time in a short period of time, and the problems are concatenation, a rupture, the whole link may collapse.
Technical ceiling
Nuance's speech technology is based on statistical inference methods, focusing on phonemes (voices of syllables) and context to recognize utterances. In terms of recognition, Nuance's algorithms and patents lead other competitors. However, speech recognition technology is not unattainable. Especially after 2010, patents and algorithms are playing a less and less important role in the context of speech applications. The pure recognition rate of each voice gradually converges to the same level, and the gap is no longer sensible. If we continue to deepen the recognition technology, the road will be narrower and narrower, and the cost will not be directly proportional to the effect of improvement.
Loss of customers
At this time, deep learning was unprecedentedly fierce. It was widely used in speech technology, eliminating the need for many speech model creation links, making the difficulty, cost, and time all drastically lower. A large number of manufacturers poured into this industry and Nuance was in the same dimension. Start the competition. At this time, companies such as Apple, Samsung, and Google are all focused on developing their own speech technology in order to get rid of their dependence on Nuance. Nuance's technological advantages are gradually absent and customers are slowly starting to lose.
Core talent is frequently dug
The lost customers began to dig Nuance corners in order to gather a large number of talents to develop their own voice products. Apple is the most strategic partner of Nuance, and it has the most high-profile manoeuvre. Apple quietly set up a voice technology R&D team at Nuance's hometown of Boston. Apple not only absorbed voice technicians who serve Siri, but also used Nuance’s top executives. And advanced speech researchers recruited, including Nuance former vice president of research and development Larry Gillick and voice senior scientist Gunnar Evermann, Don McAllaster and so on.
At the same time, in order to avoid Nuance's patent obstacles, Google excavated Mike Cohen, the co-founder of Nuance's work ten years, as the "speech leader" to develop corresponding speech recognition technology. Interestingly, Hugo Barra, Xiaomi’s global vice president, was also the product manager of Nuance and was recruited by Google in 2008.
The loss of core personnel means that Nuance's technical barriers have been disguised as disintegrated, and the dependence of large companies on it has been decreasing. This is equivalent to Nuance, who relies on technical output to obtain revenue.
Sell ​​or transform
If you continue to rely on technical output is almost a dead end, so Nuance has repeatedly tried to open up new business, had wanted to enter the mobile side to do a vote, but at this time Google has free speech recognition software for Android developers, and Nuance is obviously not Willing to participate in this free game. The Nuance development of consumer-oriented products for the C-side does not seem to be recognized by the market.
At this point, Nuance is faced with two options: to sell or to lose the past, fully transforming itself into a corporate solution provider.
Previously it was rumored that Samsung, Apple, and Baidu all intended to acquire Nuance, but ultimately failed to return. Analysts said that Nuance employs more than 15,000 people and the transaction size is also in the range of 5-10 billion U.S. dollars. It is therefore a question of whether or not potential acquirers can absorb the huge Nuance.
Seeing that it is difficult to sell this road, it can only take the second road and transform into a solution provider.
 Road to transformation 
In order to have a place in the enterprise market, Nuance has established four business units:
The Medical Business Department provides medical record management and handbook transcription services.
The Enterprise Business Unit provides customer service and call center applications for the banking or telecommunications industries.
The Mobile Devices Business Unit provides command and control functions, voice search and SMS applications in mobile phones and automotive equipment.
The Image Business Unit provides MFP multi-function scanning, PDF, and document automation solutions.
Medical Solutions
Among the four business units, the most income is the medical business department. The business of this department is to provide voice navigation file system and application programs for clinical professionals. Nuance's medical applications can be integrated with other companies' physicians' records records to realize patients. The completeness of electronic medical record records in different clinical systems, different medical platforms, and out-of-hospital hospitals effectively improves doctors' diagnostic efficiency. According to statistics, doctors use Nuance's clinical speech recognition technology products to record nearly 100 million patient data each year. According to market feedback, 94% of medical institutions are considering or have a strong interest in using clinical speech recognition technology. The medical service not only allowed him to find a new source of continuous hematopoiesis, but also solved practical problems for medical institutions. In addition, telecom operators and banks are also key customers.
Call Center Solution
An important product of the enterprise business department is the Nuance Recognizer (call center self-service solution). The vast majority of telecom operators and banks in the world use this call center solution. Nuance voice solution automatically handles over 12 billion calls per year. Inbound interactive services. With the rise of artificial intelligence customer service, Nuance is also intensively deploying this business through the acquisition of TouchCommerce and other related companies to further realize the call center's unmanned development.
Mobile application products
In addition to enterprise-level heavy-duty products, Nuance also introduced more common voice-to-text and input method software. In addition, it also provided Nina virtual assistants, conversational IVR (ignored voice response), and hosted platform solutions for customer service. Dragon Drive, a car voice assistant familiar to users, has also been adopted by many car manufacturers. Similar to Google Now, drivers can arrange schedules, order meals, listen to songs, and navigate through voice.
Voiceprint technology
While expanding its business, Nuance still remembers its essence: voice technology. In recent years, Nuance has developed the latest voiceprint technology to record and determine user identities through voice. The technology's drop-in application allows customers to tailor telephone customer service solutions to verify the identity of legitimate callers by analyzing voice content during natural conversations between callers and agents, and detect known fraudsters in real time. Increased the security of all its voice products.
 to sum upNuance started off with voice technology, gradually went through numerous twists and turns to integrate its technology into services and processes, and independently developed industry solutions to provide customers with powerful product support. Today, thousands of companies in industries such as healthcare, telecommunications, finance, and mobile applications are able to use the multidimensional services that Nuance products bring through natural language interactions. This has helped many transitional voice technology companies. To a very large reference.
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