Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Nuance CEO: Next six months will highlight our mobile technology

By | August 10, 2011, 9:29am PDT

Summary: If you connect a few dots, it sounds like Nuance’s greater visibility could come from Apple’s latest iPhone.

Nuance CEO Paul Ricci said that company is nearing an inflection point with its mobile voice services and the next six months will bring “significantly greater visibility.”

On Nuance’s third quarter earnings conference call, Ricci was asked about design wins on mobile. Nuance has been repeatedly linked to Apple’s iOS 5 for voice recognition technology. Here’s what Ricci had to say.

I do think in the next 6 months that you will see a significantly greater visibility of Nuance’s voice services on a number of mobile devices and I think the visibility of that will accelerate the awareness of our technology on mobile devices, much as Dragon Go! has done in recent weeks. And I suspect we’ll create a– yet additional demand by more mobile and consumer manufacturers to incorporate voice capabilities in their devices.

If you connect a few dots, it sounds like Nuance’s greater visibility could come from Apple’s latest iPhone. Then again, Ricci mentioned multiple mobile devices. It appears Nuance is looking for its own halo affect: Become embedded in the hottest mobile devices and other customers will soon follow.

Nuance’s mobile and consumer division delivered third quarter revenue of $93.1 million, up 31 percent from a year ago. While the mobile grabs the headlines, Nuance’s business has been carried by its healthcare division. Overall, Nuance topped Wall Street expectations in the third quarter with earnings of 35 cents a share on revenue of $345.1 million. The company also raised its outlook for the fourth quarter, but much of that bump was due to three recent acquisitions—Equitrac, SVOX and Webdmex.

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Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

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