There’s an article in todays Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on the growing market in speech recognition technologies. According to Datamonitor, sales of such technologes are growing at 22% a year. Nuance Communications dominates this market, and they’re not likely to lose this edge any time soon. The reason?
Perfecting speech-recognition technology requires collecting and studying large amounts of utterances and accents. Bill Meisel, editor of Speech Strategy News, an industry publication, estimates that it would take competitors some time to catch up with Nuance in more-advanced versions. “They certainly have more real-world data than anyone else,” he says.
So while data alone didn’t build this $3B company, it certainly was a big part of its strategy.
