Reviewing Vlingo's New iPhone App

I've been following the Cambridge speech-rec start-up Vlingo for a while (earlier coverage here).

Yesterday, they released their first app for the iPhone, which lets you talk to the phone to conduct Web searches, dial your contacts, update your Facebook status, and pull up maps.

In testing it out this morning, its accuracy rate seemed to be about 75 percent.

I tried to update my Facebook status to say "Scott Kirsner is playing with Vlingo's new iPhone app." It came up with "...is playing with Vlingo is new i phone app." So I tried again, saying, "... is playing with the new iPhone app from Vlingo," and got better results.

It quickly located the restaurant No. 9 Park on a map, as well as Diesel Cafe in Somerville and my home address in Cambridge.

With a Google search, it amazingly got "Hawaiian print quilts" on the first try, but was unable to snag the title of my latest book, "Inventing the Movies," after five or six attempts. ("In the kingdom movies"? Nope. "Investing the movies"? Close.)

The worst part of the app seemed to be voice dialing. You'd think this would be easy, since it's such a limited set of names. But the accuracy declined to about 50 or 60 percent here, in my unscientific test.

The main additional feature I'd want from this app is the ability to use Vlingo to compose text messages and e-mails. (The iPhone's keyboard is horrible!) I'd gladly pay...

There's a video demo on the company's site.

Is Nuance the Second Coming of Lernout & Houspie?

Over at the gethuman blog, speech industry analyst Walt Tetschner has a provocative piece asking whether Nuance Communications is starting to look like a rerun of Lernout & Houspie, the Belgian company that rolled up speech-recognition companies, but collapsed in 2001 due to an accounting scandal.

(Nuance, then known as ScanSoft, bought up many of the L&H assets.)

Tetschner, who runs the firm Voice Information Associates, writes:

Nuance continues to be a house-of-cards that is likely to come crashing down. The only question is when. Nuance does not generate GAAP profits. It shows proforma profits by excluding a huge amount of stock compensation. Naive investors buy the stock based on distorted information from top management, but knowledgable management keeps selling the stock. The growth rate is inflated through acquisitions that are enormously over-priced. A lack of transparency and distortion of the truth by Nuance top management continues to make it a challenge to figure out just what Nuance is really doing.

The activities of Nuance Communications bear a striking resemblance to what L&H was doing prior to imploding in early 2000.

Belgian-based L&H was once the world's leading maker of speech technology software. In early 2000, reports of accounting irregularities surfaced that prompted arrest of the company's founders. It sought reorganization under bankruptcy laws in the United States and Belgium. The situation led in October to the firm being declared insolvent and its assets being put up for sale.

A few of the more obvious similarities are 1) a highly aggressive M&A program that was attempting to eliminate competitition and 2) constant distortion of reality by the corporate management.

The two companies routinely grossly overpaid for acquisitions that were being made. They then attempted to distort this. For example: Nuance is paying $160 million for SnapOn and is then attempting to distort this by measuring with speculative future revenue contributions.

It's a fiery piece worth a read if you're in the speech rec space...

Nuance v. Vlingo: Legal Battles in the Speech-Recognition Space

It's great to have the biggest stand-alone company in the speech recognition business here in Massachusetts: Nuance Communications. But I wonder if we're starting to see some negative effects... as Nuance seems to believe it owns all of the IP in the speech-rec field. They've been fairly litigious of late, and have yet to win a lawsuit in court.

Today's Globe column focuses on Nuance's latest lawsuit against a rival. This time, the defendant is Vlingo, a 35-person start-up in Harvard Square, co-founded by an ex-Nuance executive, Mike Phillips.

I prepared a chart that didn't run with the column, highlighting some of the other recent Nuance lawsuits. Here it is:

2004 – Burlington-based Nuance Communications, Inc. (then known as ScanSoft, Inc.) files suit against Woburn-based VoiceSignal Technologies, Inc. for infringing a patent related to voice-controlled dialing on mobile phones, and trade secret misappropriation. In 2006, VoiceSignal sues Nuance for patent infringement related to an approach to correcting mistakes used by dictation software. In 2007, Nuance buys Voice Signal for $263 million, ending the litigation.

2004 – Nuance sues ART Advanced Recgnition Technologies, Inc. of Israel for patent infringement over voice-controlled dialing for mobile phones. In 2005, Nuance acquires ART, ending the litigation.

2006 – Nuance sues California-based Tellme Networks, Inc. over two patents related to directory assistance and call center technologies. Microsoft acquired Tellme in 2007, but the lawsuit is still pending.

2006 – Nuance sues SoftMed Systems, Inc. of Maryland, alleging that SoftMed violated patents that cover centralized digital dictation systems and priority voicemail systems. The two companies later settled out of court.

2008 – Nuance sues Vlingo, Inc. of Cambridge over a patent pertaining to adapting speech recognition software to individual users.

Lawsuit to watch: Nuance sues Vlingo

Nuance, the biggest speech recognition software company in the world, is suing tiny Vlingo, a Cambridge start-up, for patent infringement. Vlingo co-founder Michael Phillips had been a Nuance employee before starting the company, which focuses on speech recognition on mobile phones. He took a year off to sit out his non-compete agreement before starting Vlingo.

From Nuance's press release about the lawsuit:

In its complaint, Nuance states that Vlingo infringes a Nuance patent that covers a technique for adapting a speech recognition system to the speech of individuals or groups. In the claim, Nuance seeks monetary damages for infringement and injunctive relief to prevent Vlingo from continuing to infringe U.S. Patent No. 6,766,295, entitled “Adaptation of a Speech Recognition System across Multiple Remote Sessions with a Speaker.”

Update: Vlingo's PR rep just sent along this response, from CEO Dave Grannan:

We believe this lawsuit is unfounded. Nuance has referenced a patent that has serious limitations in its coverage. The patent does not apply to vlingo’s technology; moreover, we have significant doubts regarding the patent’s validity. Vlingo’s technology is based on a license of IBM’s core speech recognition platform, which is used by hundreds of companies worldwide. Industry observers will recognize this as typical counterproductive behavior of filing frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to stifle competition. Vlingo will fight the lawsuit aggressively to its conclusion, while continuing to build on our tremendous momentum we’ve gained in less than one year since our public launch.

Some earlier video of Phillips doing a Vlingo demo is here. And Phillips is also mentioned in this Globe column.

When demos go awry (Sunday Globe column on Nuance Communications)

Yesterday's column looks at Nuance Communications, one of Massachusetts' biggest software companies, and the dominant player in speech recognition.

From the story:

When it comes to controlling a mobile phone, car stereo, desktop PC, or GPS device by voice alone, software from Nuance Communications Inc. is fast becoming the equivalent of Intel Inside. In terms of the breadth of its products, and the number of employees it has dedicated to speech recognition, Nuance looms over its bigger rivals, IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp. But on the local and national tech scenes, Nuance is far from well-known.

"They've taken a fragmented industry and rolled it up into one company," says Daniel Ives, an analyst at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co., alluding to CEO Paul Ricci's passion for picking up smaller speech recognition companies. (Friedman, Billings makes a market in Nuance's stock, but hasn't done any investment banking for the company.) "Speech recognition is still a green field opportunity, and I view them as the 800-pound gorilla in the space."

There are two videos this week -- one of the demo that Nuance exec Peter Mahoney gave me last week, and another video that Mahoney recorded in response to my column and video, which explains why things didn't go smoothly when he was showing me a TomTom speech-guided GPS.

Here's my video of the original demo:



And here's Mahoney's reply, posted to YouTube: