Nuance Nabs Jott; Targets Mobile Assistance, UC and CRM
The acquisition of Seattle-based Jott brings a few mature applications and a few hundred thousand registered users to Nuance’s suite of voice-enabled mobile services. Founded in 2006 as part of a small covey of firms specializing in mobile transcription, Jott quietly cultivated a community of users for “Jott Assistant,” its flagship service. That’s the style for rival firms like Vlingo, Yap! and Ditech. But competition and market realities are about to change dramatically.
With Nuance as its parent company, Jott is ready to step up product development and marketing efforts to raise awareness of the core “Assistant” product while stepping up efforts to sell into enterprises and wireless network operators. On the enterprise side, the two companies see an immediate opportunity to use voice input to input “notes” and other data into CRM systems – like Salesforce.com. They are collectively poised to exploit two major growth spurts in enterprise infrastructure spending: “Unified Communications” (UC) and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC).
Nuance and Jott together have the product development and marketing heft to move mobile voice services forward. For Jott, the purchase amounts to life extension in an emerging, but highly competitive marketplace. For Nuance the acquisition gives them an opportunity to show that, yet again, they are masters at acquiring new technologies and integrating or merging them into solutions.
Dan, I wouldn’t necessarily call us a rival firm since we generically provide a hosted speech-to-text platform for a multitude of use cases. Yap’s not in the business of creating applications, we leave that to our customers/partners. I think I read on another site where John mentioned they had 10,000 users. Our being a platform play allowed us to pass that in a blink of an eye. More relevant to this discussion is our backing their primary competitor, reQall.
Thanks for the note Igor – I’m writing longer advisory/report on speech-to-text applications and your clarification is useful. Neither ReQall nor Qtech (the company that makes it) has a very high profile at this point.
As for Yap, I think you’ll find that being a platform for other people’s voice-to-text applications to be a mixed blessing. You’ll have the constant challenge of gaining visibility. There’s a considerable amount of heavy lifting ahead in terms of market conditioning and promoting adoption of new ways of doing things. All of us – meaning analysts, applications providers and arms merchants like Yap have a role to play.
The “blink of an eye” reference is provocative. Can you provide more detail on user stats, popular applications and use cases?