The week of Thanksgiving is usually characterized by a news lull, but Nuance has been an exception. Yesterday it announced financial results for last quarter which reflected more than 17% growth in top line revenues across all business units, driven 34% growth in “mobile and consumer” and a near doubling in “imaging” solutions. Then the financial community was momentarily tantalized by a rumor (traced to a video interview with Steve Wozniak of all people) that Apple “had bought” Nuance – a prospect that is not likely at this time.

But Nuance’s success, both in the marketplace and financial markets, is increasingly predicated on its successful support of new mobile, customer-facing apps. Corporate spending on automated speech is down, as reflected in a 4.5% decline in top line revenues among for the “enterprise” business unit. In spite of the fact that Nuance’s roster of clients includes a healthy mix of telecom and technology companies, like Acer, AT&T, Comcast, Delta, Express Scripts, GM Onstar, IB System, Invomo, Metro PCS, Telekom Deutschland, Telstra, T-Mobile, and Vodafone.

The rumor of Nuance’s acquisition by Apple may be greatly exaggerated, but stories about successful integration of Nuance mobile speech processing into iPhone-based services is not. Today, just in time for the holiday shopping season, the company announced that its Dragon-branded technologies for “natural language” speech recognition, dictation and text-to-speech rendering is the foundation for a newly introduced Price Check By Amazon iPhone app.

The same technology provides a way for users Ask.com for iPhone to speak their queries. Ask.com, now a property of Barry Diller’s IAC, was one of the first Web-based resources designed to build communities of peers (or experts) who could answer a visitors questions. Through the iPhone, Ask.com users can get immediate responses while on-the-go.

That’s why Nuance’s future is not tied to any impending acquisition as much as it is predicated on a succession of partnerships and integrations. The Woz may have confused Nuance with Siri in the now famous “gaff”, but we must point out that Siri’s own speech recognition capability is “powered by Nuance.”

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Tags: mobile search, Apple, Mobile Speech Apps, Amazon, Ask.com, ASR, TTS