Computer Voices

A regular reader forwarded the following letter. Nuance continues to move forward with voice recognition. So far, the big productivity has been in dictation of medical transcripts. Eventually, we will talk to our computers and they will talk back, a life changing system.



Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 6:07 AM
To: All Employees
Subject: New Acquisition by Nuance
Importance: High


Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to report that today Nuance announced that we have acquired Philips Speech Recognition Systems (PSRS), a business unit of Royal Philips Electronics. PSRS is headquartered in Vienna, Austria and is the leader in providing speech recognition solutions to the European healthcare market.

This acquisition is an important strategic move for the company as it extends our presence in the healthcare market beyond North America, where we've focused most of our efforts up until now. PSRS' technology helps physicians document clinical notes accurately and efficiently with advanced dictation and speech recognition solutions, and provides Nuance with an immediate leadership position in healthcare speech recognition for Europe. The combination of Nuance and PSRS will accelerate our ability to provide our worldwide healthcare customers with a full suite of speech driven clinical documentation and communication solutions that improve patient care and safety, reduce operating costs and increase overall revenue for healthcare provider organizations.

With the addition of PSRS' expanded speech recognition vocabularies (medical, legal, insurance and correspondence) Nuance gains significant language coverage and enhanced recognition accuracy for its solutions. Nuance is also pleased to add Philip's strong worldwide patent portfolio, primarily focused in the areas of speech recognition and associated workflow solutions and expects core recognition accuracy improvements to its speech based solutions for businesses and consumers worldwide.

We are excited to welcome the talented employees of PSRS, who are primarily located in Austria, with smaller teams located in Germany, Spain, UK, and France. We will keep you updated on our progress as we move through the integration process and our teams begin to work toward a combined organization. In the meantime, I invite you to review the attached press release for much more detail about this transaction.

I appreciate your continued support as we make major progress towards meeting our company's goals. I am excited about the possibilities that PSRS offers Nuance and anticipate great success in the future.

Regards,

Bob Wise
President, Healthcare Division