It’s hard to believe that two companies that have spent the last three years suing each other really mean it when they say that together they will be stronger. I’m talking about speech recognition competitors Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo and Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications.

The two software makers announced Tuesday that Nuance would acquire the younger, smaller Vlingo. It came as a shock, just months after Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo hit Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) with a lawsuit that included allegations like commercial bribery and unfair competition.

On the surface it looks like a potential last resort option for the smaller startup after years of costly legal battles (covering patent infringement, false advertising, and more). But the marketing machines of Apple and Google and their newest voice-controlled smartphones, such as the iPhone 4S, could mean a host of new threats in the speech software space, causing the formerly embattled companies to join forces to survive, a number of Boston mobile experts have said.

All pending lawsuits between the companies are now “stayed,” Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan told me, meaning that they’ll be put in limbo until the acquisition closes, at which point they’ll be officially dismissed. Grannan has previously said he’d be open to an acquisition by Nuance if the terms were favorable. In a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, Grannan declined to discuss how much Nuance paid for Vlingo, but did want to talk “the timing of the transaction.”

The shotgun marriage of Nuance and Vlingo comes two months after Apple introduced its iPhone 4S with the built-in voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri, which can handle everything from searching for weather information to calling a cab.

“That has caused just a legion of new competitors to enter the space,” Grannan said. His company makes voice-recognition software that exists as a standalone application sold in the Google Android, Blackberry, and Apple iTunes app stores, and built into devices like Samsung mobile phones.

Facing other voice recognition startups doesn’t seem as menacing, but confronting one major Internet giant does. “It’s more scary for us that Google is going to double down its investment to try to catch Apple’s Siri,” Grannan said. “Both sides realized that we’ve long since passed the value of competing. If we’re going to survive in this marketplace we need to cooperate.”

Mountain View, CA-based Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) recently acquired Clever Sense, the maker of a mobile assistant app called Alfred that makes recommendations on nearby bars and restaurants. The purchase has been pegged as part of Google’s strategy to take its share of the voice-enabled virtual assistant space.

“Rather than spend the next year in legal battles, [Nuance and Vlingo] decided to join forces on this,” said Mark Lowenstein, managing director for the consulting firm Mobile Ecosystem. The acquisition … Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based voice-to-text tech startup Vlingo, which just three months ago charged Nuance Communications with unfair competition, commercial bribery, breach of contract, and intentional interference with prospective business relationships, is being acquired by the Burlington, MA-based speech software giant, according to an announcement today.

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) and Vlingo, which develops speech-recognition technology for cell phones that has been likened to Apple’s Siri, have spent years wrangling in court, starting with a 2008 patent infringement lawsuit filed by Nuance, covering its patent known as ’295. As of this September, the two companies were involved in seven open lawsuits with each other, five of which were filed by Nuance and two of which came from Vlingo.

[Disclosure: the brother-in-law of Xconomy Boston editor Greg Huang is a co-founder of Vlingo. Mr. Huang was not involved in the planning, directing, reporting, or editing of this story.]

Today’s announcements make no mention of the lawsuits. Nuance said in its statement that consumer demand for voice-enabled controls on devices like phones, tablets, televisions, and navigation devices prompted the deal, and that “Nuance and Vlingo will combine their deep innovation and R&D expertise to deliver next-generation natural language interfaces across numerous markets and industries.”

Vlingo’s statement was much less detailed, noting that the transaction was subject to customary closing conditions, that it is expected to close in 2012, and that its purchase price is not being revealed. The startup also noted that it will operate as an independent company until the closing is complete. The Nuance press release quotes Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan as saying: “Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding. As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone.”

In its September lawsuit against Nuance, Vlingo revealed the complicated relationship it shared with Nuance. The lawsuit alleged that at one point Nuance CEO Paul Ricci attempted to bribe three Vlingo executives by offering them $5 million each if they could convince their board of directors to sell to Nuance (which was already an investor in Vlingo). Despite all of it, Grannan mentioned that he wasn’t opposed to selling his startup to Nuance, but that they “don’t want to be forced into doing it at a low price based on these tactics that they use.”

When I spoke with Grannan back in the summer, right after Nuance accused Vlingo of false advertising based on statements Vlingo made on its website about its technology, he noted that the bigger company was using litigation as a business strategy. “They just want to get us into court to cost our startup time and money,” Grannan said.

Vlingo appeared to have gained some ground in August, though, when a federal jury in Boston found that Vlingo did not infringe on the Nuance ’295 patent, which covers the technique for making computerized transcriptions of a users’ speech more accurate over time using audio samples from multiple sessions. But it’s presumably been a costly road for Vlingo. Grannan hasn’t disclosed the startup’s exact legal expenses, but noted that each patent trial can run a company between $2 million and $3 million. And in 2010 Vlingo bought a crop of patents from Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures as aid in the patent litigation.

Both companies say that they are committing to innovating and taking a bigger share of the voice-driven virtual assistance space. It will be interesting to see whether the two companies are truly “stronger together,” given their bitter and embattled history.

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Vlingo, the Cambridge, MA-based startup that makes a suite of speech-to-text applications used by millions of iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia mobile device owners, is about to get a brain transplant of sorts. It said today that it will largely abandon a core speech-recognition engine developed by IBM and maintained by Nuance Communications in favor of a system from AT&T Labs in New Jersey.

As part of the shift, says Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan, Vlingo and AT&T have agreed to a long-term strategic alliance. Vlingo’s speech scientists will be able to modify and improve the source code for the AT&T technology, called Watson, while AT&T will take a minority ownership stake in Vlingo. All of Vlingo’s applications will be running on top of the AT&T speech-recognition system by the first quarter of 2010, Grannan says.

Vlingo’s own speech scientists have developed software that exploits information collected from users—the way a Bostonian’s pronunciation of a dictated phrase like “I parked my car” might differ from a New Yorker’s, for example—to build statistical models that help improve speech-recogition accuracy over time. These models provide supplemental input that helps to guide a core speech-recognition engine as it transforms speech sounds into text. Vlingo didn’t build its own core engine—it has long licensed that part of its system from IBM.

The switch from IBM’s engine to AT&T’s is a “best of all worlds” situation for Vlingo, in Grannan’s words. For one thing, he says, the Watson technology simply works better than the IBM recognizer. “Watson is superior on speed and base-level accuracy,” he says. Once the transition is complete, users of Vlingo’s iPhone, BlackBerry, and Nokia apps should notice fewer wrong guesses in the transcriptions of their utterances. Grannan says they’ll also see a few new features, such as automatic punctuation, that Vlingo can now add because it will be able to tinker with Watson’s innards.

But just as important, the switch will help Vlingo disentangle itself from its strained relationship with Nuance.

Burlington, MA-based Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) is one of the Boston area’s biggest high-tech firms, and it is the world’s largest specialized provider of speech-related technologies. It offers software for mobile speech recognition that competes directly with Vlingo’s. In June 2008, after losing out to Vlingo on a contract to supply Yahoo with speech-recognition technology for its oneSearch service, Nuance hit Vlingo with a lawsuit alleging that … Next Page »

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If you had to pick a birthday for the Internet, September 2, 1969—40 years ago today—would be a good candidate. That’s the day a team of researchers at UCLA sent the first computer-to-computer transmissions using the Interface Message Processor (IMP), the grand-daddy of all packet-switching routers and the foundation of the military-university Arpanet, which paved the way, in later decades, for the Internet. The IMP was built at Cambridge, MA-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, now BBN Technologies. So the timing of yesterday’s announcement that BBN will become part of Massachusetts-based defense giant Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) seems auspicious, since it seems to guarantee that the firm’s long tradition of innovation will continue under local management.

Originally founded by a pair of MIT professors as an acoustic consulting firm, BBN has had a hand in the development of an eclectic range of important digital technologies, including parallel processing, speech recognition, the Logo educational software language, genetic algorithms, satellite communications, and the @ sign in e-mail addresses. But the firm has traveled a twisty path over the last decade and a half.

GTE bought the company in 1997 and, as a condition of its 2000 merger with Bell Atlantic to create Verizon, spun off BBN’s Internet-related assets under the name Genuity. (Genuity’s 2000 IPO produced disappointing returns; the company went bankrupt and was acquired by Colorado-based Level 3 Communications in 2002.) The remaining parts of BBN were pried away from Verizon in a 2004 deal led by two venture firms, Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst and Palo Alto, CA-based Accel Partners. Partners from the firms took four of BBN’s five board seats.

Since then, the 700-employee company has focused on bringing more products to market, with at least two notable successes: its Boomerang “shooter detection” system, used by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to pinpoint the origin of small-arms fire, and EveryZing, a 2005 spinoff (originally known as Podzinger) that uses speech recognition technology developed at BBN to help media companies monetize their audio and video content by creating machine-readable transcripts that can be found by search engines and ad-placement algorithms.

But venture partners aren’t, as a rule, interested in being long-term corporate overseers, so it isn’t a huge surprise to see General Catalyst and Accel handing over their stake in BBN to Raytheon, a $23 billion defense contractor and electronics manufacturer whose history in Massachusetts goes back even farther than BBN’s. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to close by the end of this year, haven’t been disclosed. But David Fialkow, managing director at General Catalyst, said in a statement that the sale was an “excellent result” for BBN’s investors and employees. BBN president and CEO Robert “Tad” Elmer said being part of Raytheon would act as “a multiplier on our proven ability to deliver advances to the market rapidly and profitably,” and Raytheon executives said the acquisition would strengthen the company’s capabilities in networking, video surveillance, and advanced sensing applications.

MIT physicist Richard Bolt and acoustics expert Leo Beranek founded the company in 1948, and brought in a former student of Bolt’s, an MIT architecture graduate student named Robert Newman, early enough to include him in the corporate moniker. The company’s first contract was for the acoustic design of the General Assembly Hall at the United Nations headquarters in New York. On the strength of that work, the firm went on to … Next Page »

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Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the Burlington, MA-based voice technology juggernaut that has already absorbed most of its East Coast competitors, reached west today, announcing that it has acquired Seattle-based Jott.

Jott, founded in 2006 by ex-Microsoft employees, started out as a free voice-to-text service that allowed users to record messages via telephone that were then transcribed into e-mails. Over time, the company transitioned to a paid business model, and expanded the capabilities of its service to let users create text messages, blog posts, appointments, reminders, and notes. The service has proved popular among mobile professionals, gaining hundreds of thousands of users, according to the company.

Nuance’s acquisition of Jott gives it a credible product in the area of phone-based voice-to-text services, where other companies such as Google, with its Google Voice service, and UK-based Spinvox have begun to encroach.

“Jott’s voice-to-text offerings have experienced a groundswell of adoption and positive industry recognition since the company’s inception, and we’re thrilled about the opportunity to expand our market reach and our voice services portfolio,” Nuance senior vice president Michael Thompson said in an announcement. “Together we will deliver a range of new services to our mobile operator and enterprise customers.”

Nuance isn’t saying how much it shelled out for Jott. The startup was funded by Bain Capital Ventures, Draper Richards, Ackerley Partners, and UK-based Atomico Investments; its last publicly divulged funding round, in 2007, amounted to $5.4 million. Jott may have needed a larger partner like Nuance in order to compete in its sector, given that competitor Spinvox, with some $200 million in venture cash, had far outpaced it in fundraising efforts.

Nuance and Jott said that Jott’s services, including Jott Assistant, Jott Voicemail, and Jott for Salesforce, will keep working as usual, with no interruptions in service. But as a result of the acquisition, Jott-like capabilities may come to many more consumers—Nuance says it plans to package Jott Assistant as part of the voice services it provides to wireless operators.

“Our combined expertise will bring innovative and differentiated voice services to a variety of markets with tremendous scale,” Jott co-founder John Pollard said in a statement.

One area where Nuance’s technology may help Jott is in automated speech-to-text software. While the basic user interface that Jott users encounter when they call the service is driven by speech recognition software, users’ recordings are actually transcribed by humans working in large processing centers. Replacing those humans with advanced speech-to-text software, similar to Nuance’s Dragon Naturally Speaking line of dictation software, would be an obvious way to make Jott’s service more efficient and scalable.

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Back in March, I wrote a column about Google Voice, the reincarnated version of a voicemail unification service that Google acquired from Grand Central back in 2007. The free service gives you a single phone number for life that isn’t tied to any particular land line or cellular device—instead, calls ring through to whichever phones you specify. Voicemails get stored online and (if you want) transcribed into text e-mails. In my column, I called Google Voice “the end of the phone as we know it,” since a Google Voice number resembles an e-mail address more than an old-fashioned phone line. It goes with you everywhere, can be managed entirely through the Web, and literally turns your voicemails into e-mails.

Google Voice was, and still is, in a private, invitation-only, beta testing phase. When I checked with Google early last week, employees were still saying the service will be available to the general public “soon”—which is the same thing they were saying back in March. But the big day may be approaching. While rumors circulating last week about the service’s impending launch turned out to be false, Google Voice product manager Craig Walker did state, via his public Twitter stream, that “We’re cranking 24/7 to get there.”

In conjunction with my March column, Google kindly provided 100 Google Voice beta invitations for Xconomy readers—and not surprisingly, all of the invitations were snapped up within an hour after we publicized the offer. So in anticipation of the public launch of Google Voice, I decided to ping the lucky 100 beta account winners last Friday to find out how the service has been working out for them, and whether they’d recommend it to others.

The readers who’ve written back so far have been lavish with their praise—at least, the ones who have actually been using their accounts. Several have admitted that they never signed up, or that they signed up but found that Google Voice wasn’t what they expected, or that, as one reader put it, “I would have liked to [use it] but then work (life?) got in the way.” More about the potentially high barriers to adoption below.

Readers who’ve used Google Voice seem to like the way it lets them give out a single phone number to everyone, rather than separate office, home, and cell numbers. Several readers said they like the (somewhat sneaky) feature that lets users listen to callers as they’re leaving a voicemail, and break in if they want to talk to that person directly. And if there’s one feature everyone loves, it’s the automatic transcription of voicemail messages into e-mails—a Google invention that wasn’t part of the original Grand Central service. While Google’s speech-to-text technology is far from perfect, readers say it’s good enough to get the gist of a message across, and that it saves them from the universally dreaded task of actually listening to all their voicemail. (You can browse readers’ detailed comments below.) Xconomy’s CEO and editor-in-chief, Bob Buderi, has been using Google Voice since March, and he also cites voicemail transcription as his favorite feature.

Readers report surprisingly few technical glitches or other difficulties using Google Voice. The problems they do cite tend to be ones that are baked into the service’s design. Most people said it’s too much trouble to make outgoing calls through Google Voice, since users must either call their own Google Voice number first, or go to the Google Voice website. Which leads to another frequent complaint—the caller ID problem. Unless you place all your outgoing calls through Google Voice, then the people you call will see the number of the device you’re calling from, rather than your Google Voice number. That means you have to train everyone not to store your device’s number in their contact list, but to call you back on your Google Voice number instead. That’s plain confusing for everyone.

Asked to say whether they’d recommend Google Voice to a friend or a family member, quite a few readers said “Yes, but…” The “but” was that they’d only recommend it to people who are technically adept—”power users,” in one reader’s phrase. As another reader put it: “The person who is going to use [it] needs to be a bit of a techie (not super technical, but my wife who is not technical would get lost in the concept)…[there are] lots of configuration options which I enjoyed learning and setting up.”

How much have Xconomy readers actually used their Google Voice accounts, in the end? That varies. Some say they’ve made their Google Voice number into their main phone number, and that they use the service extensively every day. Others say … Next Page »

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Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications is wrapping up its long and sometimes contentious crusade to acquire Zi, a Canadian competitor in the market for text messaging software, which has agreed to Nuance’s $35 million buyout offer.

The deal, announced today, provides shareholders of Calgary-based Zi (NASDAQ:ZICA) with 34 cents in cash and 0.4 shares of Nuance (NASDAQ:NUAN) stock for every share of Zi stock. That values the company at 69 cents per share—or a 73-percent premium over the closing price of the stock on its last day of trading before Nuance began its tender offer to acquire Zi shares on November 25. (Hindsight is 20-20, but the Nuance offer that Zi rejected back in August was worth $40 million, or 80 cents per share.)

Zi’s board has unanimously accepted the offer; now it needs to be approved by Zi’s shareholders, at a meeting scheduled for April. Zi offers Nuance its line of products that speed entry of text messages, correct typos, among other features. The acquisition would also eliminate a competitor to Nuance’s speech-to-text technology.

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Cambridge, MA, startup Vlingo today launched a drastically improved version of its voice command and speech-to-text interface for RIM Blackberry smartphones, first released in June. The free vlingo 2.0 software, which works on Blackberry Pearl, Curve, and 8800 series phones, not only allows users to compose text messages and e-mails by speaking into their phones, but also lets them create status updates for Facebook and Twitter and launch built-in Blackberry applications such as the address book, the camera, the memo pad, or the calendar and third-party applications such as Google Maps, the Opera browser, or Viigo.

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Google’s YouTube makes it incredibly easy to share cool videos with your friends or embed them in your blog or website. The site’s friendliness toward viral distribution is probably why almost every video on the Internet ends up on YouTube sooner or later. But if big companies that publish a lot of Web video leave it to YouTube users to spread their media, they’re leaving advertising dollars on the table, argues Tom Wilde, CEO of Cambridge, MA-based video search startup EveryZing.

That’s why EveryZing is rolling out a new product today—a customized video player called MetaPlayer that helps video publishers give website visitors YouTube-style control over videos without sacrificing ad impressions.

“People want to clip, share, and read video content the same way they do with all other Web content,” Wilde told me last week. “YouTube makes it easy, so that’s where you see it happening most. The trick is balancing the need to respond to consumer requirements while still staying in business.”

EveryZing has focused to date on using speech-to-text technology developed at Cambridge’s BBN Technologies, which spun off the company in 2006, to create written transcripts of podcasts and video files. By publishing these transcripts on the Web as part of a file’s “metadata,” EveryZing makes it much easier for search engines to find the files, for advertising networks to attach relevant ads, and for viewers to jump straight to the segments within a video that interest them.

But up to now, most EveryZing customers had to go to third-party video hosting providers for the actual video player software that Web visitors use to watch videos. EveryZing client Boston.com, for example, turns to Cambridge-based Brightcove for its video services.

MetaPlayer, however, gives EveryZing customers an in-house option. The software offers several advanced functions, including thumbnail images that direct viewers to automatically identified “scenes” within a video, and time-stamped tags that make it easy to jump to the exact moment when a topic of interest is mentioned.

MetaPlayer also includes a clip-making tool that lets users pare down a video to their favorite section, then e-mail that custom clip to friends or embed it in their blog or social-networking profile. The key selling point for publishers: any “pre-roll” or “post-roll” advertising that came with the original video gets attached to the beginning or end of the customized clip.

“We’ve found that there are maybe three types of video users today on the Web,” says Wilde. “There’s the casual user who will just watch the video. Then there are the folks who want to get into it and navigate the video. Then there are the prosumers who want to use that video as part of their own publishing activities. Those folks end up being, in some ways, an extension of your own publishing capability, because they are taking videos and republishing them and getting you more consumption—and the key thing about MetaPlayer is that your pre-roll and post-roll and in-stream ads go with them,” bringing publishers more ad impressions and click-through opportunities.

EveryZing customers can also customize MetaPlayer’s look and feel (its “skin” or “chrome,” to use the industry terms). The Dallas Cowboys, for example, have created a blue, gray, and silver version that fits with the team’s extensive multimedia website (see image above).

MetaPlayer also plays well with video players from other Web video destinations, including YouTube. That means EveryZing customers can show material from YouTube inside their own branded players—tapping into YouTube’s deep pool of videos while avoiding the “lumpy” look, to use Wilde’s word, that comes from using multiple players from different companies.

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Cambridge, MA, startup Vlingo announced back in February that it had built its speech recognition software into Yahoo’s oneSearch mobile search portal. Thanks to that collaboration, users of Blackberry smartphones could speak search terms into their devices rather than having to type them using the keypad. It worked great in our tests. And now Vlingo’s taking the next step, offering free software that lets Blackerry owners use voice commands to do virtually anything they want with their phones, such as launching applications, dictating e-mails and text messages, searching the Web, and, of course, making calls.

The application, which is available for download here starting today, is designed only for the latest Blackberry models, including Curve, Pearl, and 8800-series devices. But Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan says the company is working on versions of the software for other smartphones, including Windows Mobile devices, the Apple iPhone, and eventually devices running Google’s Android mobile operating system.

“What our company is really about is solving both the discoverability and usability problems,” says Grannan. What he means is that the tiny screens and navigation buttons on mobile phones sometimes make it tricky to find and open the application you want, such as the address book or the text-messaging interface. Then, because many phones lack a full QWERTY keyboard, you have to double- or triple-type inside those applications to get anything done.

But using the new Vlingo interface, you can open an application just by holding down your Blackberry’s side button and speaking a command such as “Open address book.” Sending a text message is as easy as holding down the button and saying something like “Send message to Brian: Remember to pick up batteries on your way home.” And sending an e-mail is only slightly more complicated; you have to include some pointers for the software, thus: “Send e-mail to Brian, Subject: Batteries, Message: Be sure to pick up some fresh batteries at the store.”

You can’t yet use voice commands to do things like creating new address book entries or calendar appointments; Vlingo would have to work directly with the developers of those applications to make that possible. But that’s exactly what Grannan hopes will happen: Vlingo’s business rationale for giving away the Blackberry voice application is that giving smartphone users a taste of its convenience will inspire the companies that make those individual mobile applications to license Vlingo’s speech-recognition system for their own applications. “This is one step better than what we have done already with Yahoo oneSearch,” Grannan says. “But the Holy Grail is doing everything with voice.”

Vlingo is moving full-speed ahead with its product development plans in spite of the patent infringement lawsuit filed against the firm last week by Burlington, MA-based speech applications company Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN). Nuance says Vlingo’s technology for improving speech-to-text transcription over time—technology used in both the Yahoo oneSearch interface and the new Blackberry software—infringes on one of its own patents. Vlingo, for its part, says it’s using completely different technology. “It’s pretty black and white—the lawsuit is groundless, on the merits,” says Grannan. “They’re trying to bleed us to death and make our big customers nervous. What works in our favor is that Nuance has a history of doing this, and everyone knows it. It’s a business strategy for them.”

Vlingo loaned me a Blackberry Pearl so that I could play around with the voice application. For the most part, it works as advertised. And when it does run into difficulties getting the right transcriptions, it learns pretty quickly. In my case, the device had the ill fortune to be tested on some uncommon names and words. It had a tough time with “Wade”—when I commanded the phone to “call Wade” (i.e. my personal cell phone) it kept trying to call Grannan, since “Dave” sounds a little bit like “Wade” and his name was already programmed into the address book. After about four tries, with me correcting it each time, it understood.

The system does get a lot of messages right on the first try. For example, it had no problem with “I’m running out of cereal.” When I said “E-mail Wade, Subject: Battlestar Galactica, Message: I wish the next season wasn’t so far away,” it at least got the subject right. (The fact that it knows exactly how to transcribe “Battlestar Galactica” is undoubtedly a measure of how many sci-fi geeks like myself have been using Vlingo’s voice applications.) Unfortunately, the message itself came out a bit garbled—as the software was perhaps swayed by the earlier training I’d given it on my own name: “I wish text season wade so far away.”

And perhaps it’s mean of me to harp on it, but Vlingo still has a lot of trouble with one of our favorite words around here, “Xconomy.” After about six tries and corrections, it continued to make wretched guesses like “x connie” and “ex con me” and “text tommy.” So, Xconomy readers, a plea: Since the Vlingo system learns by aggregating audio samples and corrections from many users, we need you to help train it to recognize our name. If all of you Blackberry owners out there wouldn’t mind downloading the Vlingo software and spending 10 minutes speaking the word “Xconomy” into your device, then correcting the transcription as necessary, we’d be much obliged.

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[Story Updated 4:40 p.m. 6/18/06; see below]

If a Texas district court grants an injunction sought by Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), it could force Yahoo to shut down the voice-enabled version of its mobile search platform. The search tool is powered by software from Vlingo, a Cambridge, MA-based startup Nuance sued yesterday for alleged patent infringement.

The Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) platform, called oneSearch with Voice, works on Blackberry Pearl, Blackberry Curve, and Blackberry 8800 series smartphones, and allows users to enter Web search queries such as “Boston Red Sox scores” or “United Airlines Flight 541″ simply by speaking them into the device. Vlingo’s deal to get its speech recognition technology included in oneSearch was seen as a major coup for the Harvard Square startup, which has about 35 employees and recently closed a $20 million Series B financing round led by Yahoo.

Nuance filed its lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, a jurisdiction famous for favoring plaintiffs in patent-infringement cases. Xconomy obtained a copy of Nuance’s complaint. It alleges that Vlingo’s speech recognition software—including “without limitation, products and services Vlingo is supplying to Yahoo! oneSearch”—infringes on U.S. Patent No. 6,766,295, which was issued to Nuance engineers Hy Murviet and Ashvin Kannan in 2004. The patent covers a technique for making computerized transcription of a users’ speech more accurate over time using audio samples from multiple sessions such as phone calls.

The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages and attorney fees, and also asks the court to “preliminarily and permanently restrain” Vlingo and its business partners from making, using, and selling the allegedly infringing software. Those partners would presumably include Yahoo.

“Nuance has invested significant resources in developing technologies, building solutions and acquiring intellectual property,” Jo-Anne Sinclair, vice president and general counsel of Nuance Communications, said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “These inventions and the intellectual property protecting those inventions are a cornerstone of our business. We take great pride in and place significant value on our patents and will aggressively protect our intellectual property rights through all available means.”

A spokesperson for Vlingo said that company executives were still reading through the lawsuit and were not ready to comment publicly.

While their technologies may or may not be similar, Nuance and Vlingo have definitely shared personnel. Vlingo’s chief technology officer and co-founder, Michael Phillips, is a former Nuance employee; he landed there in 2003 when Nuance (called Scansoft at the time) acquired Speechworks, a Boston-based MIT spinoff where Phillips was principal scientist. After Phillips left Nuance, he waited a year for his non-compete agreement with the company to expire before starting Vlingo, according to the Boston Globe.

(Full disclosure: Mike Phillips is brother-in-law to Greg Huang, Xconomy’s Seattle editor. Greg was not involved in the reporting, writing, or editing of this story.)

Update 4:40 p.m. 6/18/06:

Vlingo sent Xconomy the following response to Nuance’s lawsuit from Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan:

“We believe this lawsuit is unfounded. Nuance has referenced a patent that has serious limitations in its coverage. The patent does not apply to vlingo-developed technology nor the third-party licenses we employ; moreover, we have significant doubts regarding the patent’s validity. Industry observers will recognize this as typical counterproductive behavior of filing frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to stifle competition.

Vlingo will fight the lawsuit aggressively to its conclusion, while continuing to build on our tremendous momentum we’ve gained in less than one year since our public launch.”

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Text messaging, a longstanding habit among many Asian and European mobile phone users, is finally catching on with Americans. A major survey commissioned by Cambridge, MA-based speech-to-text software company Vlingo shows that 55 percent of all U.S. mobile subscribers send text messages—and 42 percent use their phones for texting as much as they do for calling. All of which is great news for handset manufacturers and cellular providers, who often charge by the message.

The bad news is that 28 percent of all survey respondents admitted to sending text messages while behind the wheels of their cars—which, let’s just be plain, is an incredibly stupid form of multitasking. Remember all those studies out of the University of Utah showing that talking on a mobile phone while driving reduces even a young person’s reaction time to that of a senior citizen? Texting is worse. Much worse.

And the practice is even more widespread among young people: 50 percent of teenagers surveyed in the Vlingo study and 52 percent of respondents aged 20 to 29 admitted to driving while texting, or “DWT.”

“To us, the message in the data is that we’ve got a problem now, but it’s going to get a lot worse as the younger generation comes up,” says Dave Grannan, Vlingo’s CEO. “It’s our belief that this is a serious public policy and safety issue that we need to address both with public policy and technology.”

We’ll get back to that “technology” part in a moment—since Vlingo does, of course, have an idea in mind about how software can reduce the danger from DWT. “Obviously there is some self-interest for us in putting out a report like this,” Grannan says. “The fact is that we’re a speech-to-text company, and we think there are hands-free solutions that can be developed.”

But in fairness, it should be said first that Vlingo didn’t set out to study the DWT issue specifically. It commissioned the independent research firm Common Knowledge Research Services to survey nearly 5,000 U.S. consumers from 48 states about their general text-messaging habits.

And in the process it discovered some interesting tidbits: almost 30 percent of respondents, for example, send more than 100 text messages per month, and 18 percent send more than 250. Almost 35 percent said that if they were unable to send text messages, it would have a negative impact on their lives. Among those who don’t text, the leading reasons were that it’s too expensive, that it takes too long, and that typing on a phone keyboard is a hassle.

It was when the researchers asked people about their texting behavior on the road, however, that things really got scary. Asked how often they drive and text simultaneously, 6 percent said they do it once a day, 8 percent said they do two to 10 times a day, and 1.5 percent said they do it more than 10 times a day. Among teenagers, 14 percent said they engage in DWT two to 10 times a day, and 8 percent said more than 10 times a day.

Texting from the road would be distracting enough if everyone had a Treo, a Blackberry, an iPhone, or some other device with a full QWERTY keyboard. But the survey found that 89 percent of respondents still have phones with standard 12-button keypads, which means they have to tap each key up to three times to get the letter they want. And if you’re watching your phone’s screen to see which letter you’re on, you’re probably not … Next Page »

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Most radio stations these days have websites where you can listen to streaming versions of their broadcasts. But few have taken the added step of making individual shows available online—in part because there’s little financial incentive, unless they can sell online ads against that content. That’s where EveryZing of Cambridge, MA, thinks it can help—and the company said today that Cox Radio (NYSE: CXR) will use its software to make it easier for consumers (and search engines and advertisers) to find specific radio clips on the websites of all 68 of its FM and AM radio stations nationwide.

We profiled EveryZing, a BBN Technologies spinoff that uses speech-to-text algorithms to create transcripts of Web video and audio content that can then be indexed by search engines, last July and again in February. Up to now, EveryZing has mainly been working to help big media portals like Boston.com monetize their video content. But it has also had a long-running deal with Entercom Boston’s WEEI Sports Radio Network, where, according to EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde, the number of unique users listening to the station’s online clips has increased 16-fold over the last 18 months.

“The paradigm with radio on the Internet to date has been, bring it up in a streaming media player, minimize it, and listen,” says Wilde. “That’s not very interesting. It’s just another pipe. We’re trying to bring a ‘lean forward’ metaphor to the consumption of radio.” Once a company has installed EveryZing’s system, Wilde explains, customers can discover specific clips through web searches and jump precisely to the point of interest within those clips. “That’s what the Web is for and that’s what users want,” says Wilde.

The Cox deal is the biggest deployment to date for EveryZing’s software. “By partnering with EveryZing, we are able to leverage the unique content assets from our terrestrial broadcasts on the web and significantly enhance how that content is discovered, presented, and monetized,” said Gregg Lindahl, vice president of interactive technologies for Cox Radio, in EveryZing’s announcement of the agreement. Cox is in the process of acquiring an additional 18 stations that will give it a presence in 19 radio markets nationwide, including Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio, and Tampa.

Wilde says EveryZing is on a path to keep growing quickly. “As a company we’re having the right conversations and ultimately winning the right deals with established media companies, who are in great need of solutions to transition their businesses successfully into the Internet age,” says Wilde.

But only recently, says Wilde, has the company developed its software to the point where it can be scaled up to work across companies as big as Cox. “If they had come to us six months ago to do a 68-station rollout, it would have crushed us. But we’ve built out the platform with this use case in mind—conglomerates with dozens of units that need to be serviced.” Along with the Cox deal, EveryZing today introduced a new management interface called RAMP—for “Reach, Access, Monetization, and Protection”—that lets clients control how content is presented to search engines and consumers and how advertising should appear alongside that content.

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Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the Burlington, MA-based provider of speech-related software technologies and services, including the Dictaphone system used by hundreds of thousands of doctors to dictate clinical notes over the phone, said yesterday that it will purchase Needham, MA-based eScription. The company makes automated speech-to-text software that turns dictated medical notes into rough first drafts, which are then polished by professional medical transcriptionists. Nuance said it will pay $363 million for eScription—$340 million in cash and $23 million in Nuance common stock.

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