Randy, Lucent is suing a company (Periphonic) for a telephony project that interacts with the caller using speech recognition, uses dialog, gets answers and then returns the information via TTS. I'm not sure which project Lucent is concerned about, but Periphonic has systems with Charles Schwab, Sears and yesterday American Airlines.
Nuance in this case supplies some of the underlying speech recognition and is therefore a partner.
The reason for my concern, although it's not serious concern, that Lucent has some patents on how they deal with user dialog and they are protecting it with law suits. It sure seems like the issue of Natural Language Dialog Systems must have basic constricts and once they've been patented, how is the next company going to compete with out a lot of cross agreements.
For example, Altech just got a patent on what they call a "softer" barge in, which is the ability of the user to interrupt the computer. As you know, Portico is using barge in and it's very important. By the way, Altech is a company to watch. They are still private, but Altech will be a force in the future as will Nuance.
This is all such a new industry and everyone is trying to patent everything they can. My small concern is how big a war chest of patents does Lucent have on these topics and will they have reason to go after GM. Obviously, GM also holds a lot of IP in this area, so they should be dealing from strength.
So, to recap on your question, Lucent is not working with Nuance and I thought you posted the link to Nuance because they were involved with the hi profile Periphonic deals and that they were the Speech Rec. for Portico. Maybe I got it wrong. What's your interest in Nuance?
Regards,
Mark |
