Nuance Communications has forged a relationship with Beijing-based AutoNavi Holdings Ltd. to incorporate its automated speech recognition (ASR) and text-t0-speech (TTS) rendering software into a version of AutoNavi Map that will be made available next quarter. This has the potential to be a very significant “win” for Nuance. AutoNavi acquired digital mapping service provider Beijing XingTianDi Information Technology Co., Ltd in late 2006, and thus became the only digital map supplier in China with so-called “Level A” qualification combining aerial photography and mapping along with “aerial photogrammetry data production capacity.” I’m not sure I know the precise meaning of these terms, but I have observed that, with these technologies trained on the Chinese terrain, AutoNavi has managed to stave off competition from Google Maps and thus render the leading provider of smartphone mapping services in most of the world largely non-existent in China.

AutoNavi already claims to be the largest provider of mapping services to support navigation. Its free mobile map application, AMAP, had a total of 98 million users, with more than 49 million monthly active users at the end of fiscal year 2012. That means that the user base has more than doubled in the past year. At the end of its 2011 fiscal year, it had 40 million users and over 20 million monthly active users. It generated roughly $160 million in revenues in its 2012 fiscal year. Today it claims more than 100 million users.

In this press release, the companies announced plans to make voice navigation more intuitive throughout the Chinese market. AutoNavi’s core technology is already supporting navigation in over 100 models of Chinese and foreign cars. While this is speculation on my part, I would think the two companies would offer the intuitive, speech-enabled product as a fee-based enhancement to the core, free product.

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Tags: Nuance, mobile speech, Telematics, voice navigation