With its acquisition of Viecore and the joint offering with Nexidia, Nuance gave the 1,000 attendees to Conversations 2007 plenty of grist for conversations in the corridors of the Boca Raton Resort and Club. Both developments have strategic implications for users, partners and competitors. It was the coming out party for a “new” Nuance with a chance to redefine the market for speech-enabled solutions.

A beefed-up set of service offerings for the enterprise market reflects Nuance’s efforts to capitalize on the shift in enterprise spending. In partnering with Nexidia, Nuance will lower the time it takes to detect and remediate problems in automated speech callflows as new modalities (read “mobility”) and contexts (or “social networks”) take hold.

Acquisition of EAS brings Dialogic Corporation products and personnel from Brooktrout, SnowShore and Excel Switching. No direct competitor has a product line that spans fax boards, media servers and central office switches, respectively. Along with partners, it has an important role to play in defining and simplifying hardware and software for hybrid (aka “converged”) networks and unified communications.

Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, recently said that getting into the hardware business with a Google-labeled phone is not a top priority for the search engine giant. This makes strategic sense for a company that has generated billions in revenues and profits by delivering software and services across a broad variety of branded networks and devices. “Open” networks trumps the prospects of branded, proprietary handsets.

Speech-enabled search was very close to the core of SpeechTEK 2007. Starting with a keynote in which Google’s Mike Cohen described what his company has learned from offering 800-GOOG411, then cascading through a number of announcements and panels on “speech search.” It’s clear that much work remains on several fronts (user experience, database refinement, geo-positioning advertiser recruitment and ad placement, to name a few) as ecosystem members forge partnerships to bring a “complete” service to market.