IBM and Nuance Communications, a provider of speech services, have entered into a joint initiative agreement to accelerate innovation and enhance speech recognition products for enterprises. This new partnership builds upon the technology and IP collaboration between the companies announced earlier this year.
As part of the joint initiative agreement, IBM has named Nuance its preferred business partner for speech technologies and related professional services to complement IBM’s industry products portfolio. The companies said they will also collaborate to address the needs of customers in ten industries: automotive, banking, electronics, energy and utilities, healthcare and life sciences, insurance, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications and travel and transportation.
Both the companies reportedly expect to expand the opportunity for deploying speech technologies and allow enterprises and individuals to engage in commerce, access information and collaborate in application domains like customer care, unified messaging and mobile search.
Frank Kern, senior vice president of global business services at IBM, said: “As businesses and governments aim to operate more intelligently and efficiently, the full impact of speech technology is just emerging. Working with Nuance and its extensive array of complementary products and services, we are accelerating the opportunity to deliver exciting innovations to clients in key industries.”
Reportedly, the companies will forge a complementary relationship between Nuance’s speech technologies and related services, and IBM’s global business services organisation and web application server capabilities for traditional and VoIP network infrastructures. The companies claimed they will also collaborate to meet the customer requirements for customer self-service and agent optimisation.
In automotive and telecommunications industries the companies will reportedly collaborate to address the needs of in-vehicle and on-device OEMs that seek to incorporate technologies that focus on voice access to device control, search and media management.
