{"id":115062,"date":"2009-12-30T11:12:14","date_gmt":"2009-12-30T16:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"tag:contentnext.com,2009-12-30:article\/419-nuance-confirms-spinvox-acquisition-for-102.5-million"},"modified":"2009-12-30T11:12:14","modified_gmt":"2009-12-30T16:12:14","slug":"nuance-confirms-spinvox-acquisition-for-102-5-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/115062","title":{"rendered":"Nuance Confirms Spinvox Acquisition For $102.5 Million"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Earlier reports had said<\/a><\/i> Burlington, Massachusetts, digital speech company Nuance may buy troubled voicemail-to-text counterpart Spinvox<\/a> before year’s end – and Nuance on Wednesday confirmed<\/a> exactly that…<\/p>\n

The price – $102.5 million – is less than half the more-than-$200 million in investment that Spinvox had raised before things started to go bad<\/strong> earlier this year, so there’s significant loss here for investors. It comes in $66 million in cash and $36.5 million in Nuance shares (2.3 million).<\/p>\n

Nuance says it will be “integrating SpinVox\u2019s carrier services with Nuance\u2019s advanced speech recognition platform<\/strong>”, making it sound rather like the speech-to-text technology on which Marlow, England-based Spinvox has prided itself will play second fiddle to Nuance’s own. Nuance’s announcement repeats its clear statement that it’s its own, “sophisticated” speech technology which is “proven”: “This transaction marries innovative speech solutions and robust carrier-grade infrastructure to accelerate innovation.”\n<\/p>\n

It means much-needed consolidation in a digital telephony market that may yet prove hot in 2010, with Google (NSDQ: GOOG<\/a>) Voice and BT’s Ribbit ramping up to offer voice comms overlapped with web services.<\/p>\n

Until recently a second-generation dot.com darling of English media<\/a>, six-year-old Spinvox raised<\/a> its second $100 million in March 2008<\/strong> from Goldman Sachs, along with GLG (SEO: 066570) Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. Invesco Perpetual in September said<\/a> it lost 90 percent of its own investment<\/p>\n

But its finances began looking shaky<\/a> this year, when paidContent:UK reported<\/a> how staff had accepted an offer of stock instead of salary. CEO Christina Domecq, in a July interview<\/a> with us, said missed payments from its suppliers and the pressure of rolling out in Latin America had stressed company finances, and promised<\/a> the company would turn cash-positive in 90 days.<\/p>\n

But our story opened a can of worms. A BBC News story piled on, reminding readers that Spinvox’s voicemail-to-text process is not wholly automated. The company admitted the necessity to use human<\/i> transcribers at call centers in new territories is very expensive…<\/p>\n

Spinvox had never outright disguised its use of humans but, facing a perception problem in the summer season on top of financial difficulties, it was forced to raise over \u00a315 million<\/a> in emergency investment and take a \u00a330 million bridging loan to stay afloat – all while defending against staff complaints about company spending…<\/p>\n

It amounted to a perfect storm that was sure to mean investors calling for a full or partial sale. Three months ago, Invesco publicly confirmed<\/a> sale chatter by saying in a filing the company was on the block. The company declined to tell us whether it met its 90-day cash target.<\/p>\n

Nuance isn’t yet detailing which<\/i> parts of Spinvox, which has been through a few layoff rounds in the last year, may be retained, but our guess is it won’t be the whole thing. In a final effort to be upfront about the product, however, Nuance’s announcement reminds us that the service offers both “full and partial speech automation<\/strong>”.\n<\/p>\n

Related<\/strong><\/p>\n