AT&T Teams with Vlingo for Speech Recognition in Mobile Devices

AT&T and Vlingo announced a licensing agreement and strategic alliance to incorporate AT&T's Watson technology into Vlingo's speech-enabled applications. The goal it to enable people to use their voice to create and send a text message or email, search the Web, access social networking tools, etc.


As part of the alliance, AT&T will take a minority equity stake in Vlingo. Financial terms were not disclosed.


AT&T noted that it already has hundreds of voice applications deployed throughout its network. The company's Watson speech recognition technology includes the latest advances and innovations in the field of speech and language processing with a rich set of tools for custom development and adaptation of acoustic and language models. In addition to Watson, AT&T's suite of speech technologies also includes AT&T Natural Voices, a text-to-speech product that converts text into voice for a wide variety of applications.


Vlingo is a Cambridge, MA-based startup focused on unlocking access to mobile data applications with speech recognition technology that lets people control their mobile applications with the power of their voice. Vlingo's current iPhone, Blackberry and Nokia applications enable customers to simply speak to their phone to create and send a text or email message, search the web, update their Facebook status, etc.
http://www.att.com
http://www.vlingo.com