Nuance Acknowledged Vianix Actions

In the 10-Q filing by Nuance on June 30, 2009 Nuance acknowledged the pending lawsuit by Vianix - on Page 24 you can find the following:

Vianix LLC has filed three legal actions against us, consisting of two breach of contract actions and a copyright infringement claim. It is too early for us to reach a conclusion as to the ultimate outcome or proposed settlement of these actions or to estimate the potential loss that could result from a settlement or adverse judgment against us in these matters. However, we believe that we have substantial defenses against these claims, and intend to defend them vigorously.

We do not believe that the final outcome of the above litigation matters will have a material adverse effect on our financial position and results of operations. However, even if our defense is successful, the litigation could require significant management time and will be costly. Should we not prevail, our operating results, financial position and cash flows could be adversely impacted.

Needless to say the the usual rhetoric "suit without merit", "we will prevail" etc. But you have to question why a company would take on sue a large corporation and invite a host of legal costs and aggravation if they did not have a case. In one of the suits Vianix claims Royalties of $20 - 30 Million in unpaid licenses. While that number may be a small drop in the ocean to Nuance the impact of a loss and the potential for an injunction preventing he use of the technology in the interim could be quote devastating.

In addition to this there is an Antitrust investigation, recently confirmed to be focusing on the potential monopoly following the acquisition of the Philips Speech Engine by Nuance. This represents some significant challenges to the organization which are frequently covered in ASR News from Walt Tetschner

Watch this space!

Motley Fools - 3 Reasons to Sell Nuance

The Motely Fool discussion board weigh in on reasons to sell Nuance stock if you own it.

No Profits, Costly Acquisitions and lack of focus.....

$0.01-to-$0.02-per-share loss......trading future opportunity with dilution to its current shareholders.....its numerous acquisitions has also eaten into margins.....to reduce 2009 earnings by $0.05 to $0.06 per share.....spread over too many highly competitive markets..

And there remains the pending litigation with Vianix that is embedded in the iChart application that according to their numbers has more than 4,000 Hospitals and more than 250,000 individual users. With the passage of time and no news on resolution it is likely that the license contract will be canceled by Vianix leaving their product unusable. This feels similar to recent problems by Blackberyy RIM and Vonage who fell foul when they used technology without paying for it.

Nuance loss widens

Nuance posted a higher than expected loss. It beat market estimates if you exclude certain items and the forecast fourth-quarter were in line with analysts' view which expects a loss of 2 cents to 3 cents per share, on revenue of $245 million to $252 million.

Essentially losses were up from last year - Nuance loss widens; gives outlook

Nuance reported a loss of $9.9 million, or 5 cents a share, for the third quarter ended June 30, compared with a loss of $7.6 million, or 4 cents a share, a year ago.

Nuance in Hot Water over Unpaid Licenses

Ironic for a company that spends an inordinate amount of time and energy hassling legitimate users of their software with phone home licensing tools that they seem unable to pay license fees themselves........

SpeechTech Magazine is reporting a $30 Million lawsuit against Nuance here

The Vianix MASC codec is embedded in many of Nuance's products including:

...Enterprise Express, Enterprise Workstation, EXSpeech, iChart, iChart Managed Services, Powerscribe, and Powerscribe Workstation SDK...

That's a big chunk of business. The original suit was filed on June 2, 2008
The courthouse news service posted this on Jun 4 and the full suit can be seen here
It makes for interesting reading

"Enterprise Express in 3,000 organizations"

and in Nuance's own press release installed in more than 4,000 healthcare institutions and in June 2007 they issued a release stating that iChart was in use by more than 285,000 unique health care providers and more than 14,000 transcriptionists in 511 sites. That's a lot of sites and users of the technology. $30 million seems on the low side.....

Speech Recognition - Online Interactive Voice Response Frustrations

No doubt many people are frustrated with poorly designed Speech Recognition systems but Paul English created a web site some time ago that continues to be a gold mine of resources for people who want to bypass the automated system and get directly to a real human being. As they say on their site

When you're sick of pressing 10 or more options in order to reach a human and spending many minutes or even hours on hold, consult the GetHuman database of secret phone numbers and codes that get an actual, live person on the line for customer service.

Here's the link to GetHuman.com

By the way - a pet peeve.... spending any time at all telling me that your system has changed and I should listen carefully is a waste of my time and yours so stop doing it!

Time to reconsider deploying Speech Rec...?

CIO magazine features an article on deploying speech recognition for callers
But as the article points out

What frustrates customers most about automated voice menus? A survey from the Yankee Group found that 63% of callers were distressed by long hold times, and 50% reported that automated menus were confusing. Other major complaints include: being asked the same question more than once, getting trapped in a menu of options that don’t apply to the customer’s needs, and lack of personalization. The group’s survey also found that 18% bypass the automated menu 100% of the time when they can.

This is not rocket science - if the people deploying these call systems actually had to call for themselves they would soon work out what works and what does not. Failing that just take a quick trip to www.gethuman.com for some insight into what does not work and how people will get around your system.
I think it was Paul English I head say some years back - your existing customers are the ones that deserve the best treatment so don't put them through hell on some interactive voice system (IVR)

Pittsburgh-based M*Modal' received the ABBY Award from the Adaptive Business Leaders Organization

Cool award for an innovator in the Speech Understanding business

"The Healthcare CEO judges in the audience confirmed that M*Modal was the most transformational new healthcare IT they'd seen this year - following a search that spanned the country," noted ABL's President, Mimi Grant, following the Awards ceremony. "The company's technology understands the context of "words" recorded in dictation, captures their medical "meaning" and transfers it automatically into accessible, electronic medical records. This is nothing short of amazing." Grant added: "And what's particularly impressive is that Michael Finke, the founder and CEO of M*Modal, has a technology background, proving once again that the biggest breakthroughs to healthcare's toughest problems frequently come from innovators outside the industry." The awards ceremony was held in Costa Mesa, CA on April 23.

Speech is the rising star

Philips sells controlling stake in Medquist Inc. to CBaySystems for US$285 Million

Sale finally goes through......
Price is only for the 70% stake and leaves the remaining30% open

The Associated Press

Thursday, May 22, 2008

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands: Philips Electronics NV has agreed to sell its 69.5 percent stake in MedQuist Inc. to CBaySystems Holdings Ltd. of the Virgin Islands for around US$285 million (€185 million).

Philips says it agreed to sell MedQuist, a U.S.-based medical transcription service, for US$11.00 (€6.98) per share, a premium of 47 percent on its closing price in New York on Wednesday.

Philips said in a statement Thursday the deal will close sometime this fall, conditional on regulatory approvals.

Medquist lost US$4.4 million (€2.8 million) on sales of US$84 million (€53 million) in the first quarter.

CBaySystems, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, provides billing and other services for U.S. hospitals and has outsourcing operations in India.

Good News for Medical Transcriptionists

A veteran transcriptionist promoting does not see Speech Recognition as the end of their work but in fact a natural addition to what is a booming industry.

With the rise in both the popularity of voice recognition (VR) software as well as outsourcing of transcription work overseas, the professional forecast can seem a bit gloomy for the average work-from-home medical transcriptionist these days. As a veteran MT with eighteen years experience, I can tell you that I have, indeed, lost accounts to VR. I can only wonder if any of the clients I couldn't hold onto were lured by outsourcing. However, I would hardly conclude that the MT's days are numbered. In fact, I believe that with a little fine-tuning of one's personal and professional goals, today's transcriptionist can be just as busy and successful as ever.

Read more here

CBay Trasnscription Systems Using Advance Speech Recognition

CBay Systems a leading provider of medical transcription services has announced it is using M*Modal speech recongtion and language undeerstadning tools. Thsi includes the "most advanced speech understanding service" according to M*Modal. That's another transcription provider using Speech Recognition to improve efficiency. The technology has reached tipping point and those not on board will be left behind

Read More here

Increasing Useage in Medical Transcription by Transcend (TRCR)

Transcend Services inc (NASDAQ: TRCR), a leader medical transcription services in the U.S. healthcare market announced results year end December 31, 2007 with a significant increase which included an increase from 20% to 24% of editing done using speech recognition tools

Approximately 24% of the Company's total production volume was edited using speech recognition technology in the fourth quarter, compared to 20% in the fourth quarter of 2006. The Company's goal is to grow this percentage to 40% over the next two years, assuming the mix of work on BeyondTXT versus other platforms stays relatively constant. In addition, the Company processed approximately 15% of total volume offshore during the fourth quarter, compared to 7% in the fourth quarter of 2006. Offshore volume as a percentage of total volume is expected to grow gradually over the next several years. We do not expect the growth in offshore volume to impact our domestic workforce.

See more here

ER Docs Embrace Speech Recognition

More physicians moving towards speech recognition - and in a challenging speech recognition environment

Christopher Obetz, M.D., an emergency medicine physician at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, has been using speech recognition software for two years and likes the faster turnaround time and cost savings. "I'm able to complete my charts and consult other physicians about patients in real time," he says. "In the past, you might not see dictated notes for six to 12 hours, but now it's instantly accessible."

Read more here

Speech Recognition to the Rescue for a Busy Medical Group

As the article says

Physicians don’t want to keyboard

Add to that the crippling nature of costs associated with transcription and he long lag times and you have a problem that Speech recognition is well suited to fixing

So at the Camino Medical Group in Mountain View, Calif:

Today we have nearly 300 doctors across the South Bay Area self-completing 6,500 reports each week. We have reduced more than $2 million in annual transcription expenses by eliminating outside transcription of dictated reports. Of equal importance, we have created a way to migrate other physicians who were still handwriting reports to an electronic format without incurring costs.

We do still have a few physicians handwriting reports, however we have already gotten very close to our goal of 100 percent of physicians using dictation with speech recognition and 70 percent using the self-editing functionality. We estimated that without speech recognition, converting all of our handwritten reports to traditional dictation-transcription would cost more than $4 million.

You can read the article in Healthcare Informatics

Cutting Time for Physicians with Speech Recognition

Cutting Time for Physicians with Speech Recognition

In a busy Orthopedic surgeons practice in Detroit MI an orthopedic surgeon is using Speech recognition to help him document and communicate all the information he gathers on his patients - 60 in a busy day in his office.

Paperwork for this took hours to complete and included all the forms required for billing/insurance as well as prescriptions and referral letters and his own notes. Like many he used to use dictation and Medical Transcription that not only cost him money but cost him and his patient's time - in many cases days.

But now he is using gloStream gloEMR electronic medical record solution featuring clinical decision tools, document management optimized for clinical workflow and built in speech recognition technology.

In this model gloStream is aiming to replace the costly transcription that small doctors offices pay for each month with a monthly fee for access to their system which will allow them to document and provide all the tools necessary for managing patients, documents, laboratory tests etc and loose the transcription requirement by integrating Speech Recognition into the application all for $1,000

Doctors like Nallamothu gave it high marks, citing in particular its voice-recognition tool.

No details on what speech recongtion solution is powering this applciation but it uses "a Microsoft Vista platform"

You can read more about it here: HEALTH: Voice-recognition device cuts time for physicians

Not Everyone Wants Speech Recognition - Gethuman.com

David Hull @ "Field Notes on the Web" is not fully taken with Speech Recognition and he does have a point

...I'm not sure speech is going to take over as completely as one might think. Why do people send text with cell phones? One would be hard-pressed to imagine a more tortuous way of producing text than to thumb it in on a tiny numeric pad, especially before word recognition, but people did, and do, even when they could call, or leave a voice mail.

He's right - Texting was the new way to communicate seasonal greetings this year:

About 65 million texts were sent through O2 on Christmas Day...
The three largest mobile phone service providers in the country said more than 62 million messages were sent on December 24 and 25 - five million more than in 2006.
Swisscom counted more than 25 million electronic messages on its network, with a little over half sent on Christmas Eve.....
One billion text messages are sent every week in the UK....
The Mobile Data Association (MDA) today announced that 4,825 billion messages were sent during September 2007, an average of over 1.2 billion messages every week, staggeringly, the same number of messages sent during the whole of 1999

Anyway - I digress. Speech Recognition is not going to replace all other forms of data capture with technology but it is going to become more pervasive. There are lots of reasons why you might not want to use speech to interact with technology:

Personally I would prefer not to talk to my computer much of the time, either because the environment is noisy (playing havoc with accuracy), or because it's quiet (and I don't want to disturb anyone), or because there's someone else in the room I might like to talk to without confusing the UI.

In short, speech recognition is useful now (particularly if typing is difficult or impossible for a person) and will continue to become more useful as the technology continues to improve, but I don't see it taking over the world.

That said it is already in use on many verbal exchanges taking place today. At least one government (with participation from at least another 3 or more) is listening in in the form of Echelon (allegedly) . And we are increasingly being connected to voice recognition systems on the phone. ON on that point - there are times when it works and it is better but many times the system is so poorly designed and treats the customer/individual poorly we all just want to get to a real human being....enter gethuman.com a site that was set up by Paul English. He's a successful entrepreneur - if I remember correctly he described himself as a serial entrepreneur (Boston Light Software and Kayak) and a philanthropist - a real gentleman.

If you get frustrated with the speech systems online check this site out - it provides you with the quickest way to ....... get a human being.

Voice Recognition built in to Bluetooth Devices

BlueAnt and Sensory Partner in Voice Interfaces for Bluetooth Devices

"Bringing intuitive Voice User Interface for the Bluetooth headset market where speech control and a complete hands-free control will dramatically enhance the user experience."

As they say in their press release:

the first ever Bluetooth headset with a true voice user interface (VUI). The BlueGenie Voice Interface software suite enables manufacturers of Bluetooth products to integrate full voice control and synthetic speech output without the need for visual displays or complex user interfacing.

Users of the BlueAnt V1 will no longer deal with lengthy or confusing button pressing to access functionality. Instead, the VI can be controlled with simple phrases like "pair headset," "call home," "volume up" and "accept call." When it comes to checking headset status it will not be necessary to interpret confusing beep sequences or LEDs. BlueGenie's voice synthesis capability enables the V1 to speak back to the consumer, letting them know device settings including successful pairing of the headset, battery power level, etc.

I can't be the only one who can't remember the never ending list of button sequences to program my blue tooth headsets..... this has to be better.

Speech in GPS Navigation Systems - Garmin 880

Speech recognition in a GPS system that really works - check out this video on Gizmodo

...we were impressed with just how good the voice recognition really was. Not only could it hear us over the Vegas traffic and the radio

This included some intelligent speech interpretation

it even parsed out when we said "sixteen hundred" instead of "one six zero zero". Check out what we mean in the video above.

The Garmin range was already streets ahead of the competition and this just makes it even better

Here's the Garmin site video

Voice Recognition for the Police

The Australians are taking voice recognition and technology to new heights. They have created a High Tech car that includes Voice Recognition to allow the officer to keep their hands on the wheel

More information here on the Holden VE Commodore

that might make James Bond feel spoiled for choice

The speech recognition is for safety:

The Holden unit contains voice recognition software that let officers keep their hands in place on the wheel, as well as cameras that can bean (this is their typo) the action in real-time to communications centers

Cool - as Mike Elgan would say "I want one"

In Car and Motorcycle Recognition

Expect the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) coming up to feature many announcements that relate to speech recognition - Parrot who make several innovative products in the wireless world have come out with two new ones for the show

One for drivers of cars (Parrot RK8200) and the other for motorcyclists (Parrot SK4000)

See the Car unit video at CNET videos here and Engadgets review here
Motorcycle unit can be seen here and

Apart from listening to music it integrates with Blue Tooth mobile phones providing hands-free function including automatic phone book synchronization and hands-free call functionality through voice recognition and voice synthesis (Text-to-Speech) that reads contact names directly to the user.

The software is multi-user eliminating the need to record names and train the system and dials numbers automatically reading the contact names from the user’s phone book through the earpiece and also identifies radio stations to help the rider/driver select a station without taking his or her hands of the handlebar/wheel.

As the video review said.... who needs wants in car stereo with CD's anymore

Speech Recognition Goes Mobile

Even more evidence that Speech Recognition is going mainstream

SMB Advisor Middle East Focus features an article: 13 future mobile technologies that will change the way you work

The list includes: Mobile WiMax, Multihop relay networks, Femtocells and fixed-mobile convergence, Miniscule, less power-hungry mobile chips (who doesn't want that!), Wireless USB and ultrawideband and coming in at No 7

Change 7: Nearly flawless speech recognition

Featured as an important aspect for the increasingly mobile population being fed mobile devices

"Speech recognition got bogged down because it was only 98% or 99% accurate," Burrus said. "Even at that accuracy, many of us found it was faster to type. A lot of the problem had to do with processing power—speech recognition needs a lot of horsepower."

So with the new powerful chips (and probable faster network access to allow thin client style speech recognition actually delivered on the mobile device but the processing power on some server sat on the end of a high speed everywhere wireless connection) we will see

everything you do with your keyboard at your desk, you'll be able to do with speech while you're mobile.

But as they say - what could hold this technology back:

Users could be reticent about letting others in public places hear their business. They may prefer to combine better speech recognition with other methods of input.

Better microphones that allow high quality audio capture in public area with some level of privacy will help - an in case you think that's not possible I am pretty sure the Special forces around the world have microphones that allow them to talk without disturbing anyone around that might want to listen in....!