Jott Scooped by Multinational

The voice technology juggernaut Nuance, of Burlington Massachusetts, has announced the acquisition of Seattle startup Jott, absorbing yet another technologically similar company and further widening its grip on the speech technology market. Nuance, who already provide industry leading voice recognition software and systems, telephone call steering systems, and many more large scale speech and imaging applications throughout the world can now extend its reach to cover phone-based speech-to-text services, filling out it’s complement of products and services nicely.

“Jott’s voice-to-text offerings have experienced a groundswell of adoption and positive industry recognition since the company’s inception, and we’re thrilled about the opportunity to expand our market reach and our voice services portfolio,” Nuance senior vice president Michael Thompson said in an announcement. “Together we will deliver a range of new services to our mobile operator and enterprise customers.”

Nuance, once called Scansoft, once called Visioneer, will now hold an existing market share and take a strong position against competitors in the phone-based speech-to-text industry, where Spinvox and Google Voice have begun to spread their toes. They did not disclose the price-tag of the deal.

Its newly acquired Seattle start-up Jott, founded by ex-Microsoft employees in 2008, built their company on a speech-to-text system that transcribes voice recordings into e-mails and web updates. They started out as a free service but eventually moved to a subscription-based model and expanded their speech-to-text capabilities to text messages, blog points, appointments, reminders and notes.

After wrestling with the trade-off between paying customers and ad-revenue, Jott will now have the benefit of Nuance’s existing sophistications in speech recognition technology, eliminating their need for human transcribers and making their existing services more efficient and scalable.