Nuance Communications, Menlo Park, California supplier of over- the-phone conversational speech recognition systems, has completed a $15.6m round of financing from Motorola Inc, Intel Corp, Goldman Sachs and Attractor Investment Management. The financing also included funds from previous investors Mayfield Fund, US Venture Partners, and Morgenthaler Ventures. In addition to the financing, Intel and Nuance have announced plans to port and tune Nuance’s software for Intel’s IA-32 and IA-64 processor architectures. Nuance says its speech recognition software is currently in use by a number of large corporations for enabling self-service transactions. Its customer list includes Charles Schwab and Co, United Parcel Service, Sears, Roebuck & Co, American Express Travel Related Services and Lloyd’s TSB in the UK. It plans to use the cash to continue developing its speech systems and to make a push for more big name customers. Nuance is currently working with telecommunications, cellular and network infrastructure companies to use its speech recognition and speaker verification software as the enabling technology in network-based applications such as voice-activated dialing, voice-activated network services and calling card/cellular phone fraud prevention.
