Nuance Acquires Voicemail-to-Text Provider Jott

Nuance Communications expanded its Mobile Division voice services portfolio with the acquisition of Jott July 14. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jott is the creator of the Jott Assistant, which enables users to create notes, set reminders and appointments, send email and text messages, and post to their favorite Web services—all via voice.

According to Mike Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, Nuance had been very impressed with Jott and its leadership team. “When we looked at the Jott service, it was somewhat unique—in fact, it was very unique—and the users raved about it,” Thompson says. “Those two points were what got us very excited about connecting with the management team.”

The combined Nuance and Jott teams will focus on several key voice-to-text initiatives:

• To further extend the power of Jott across the mobile mass market, Nuance plans to package and offer Jott Assistant to mobile operators as part of its voice services portfolio;
• Nuance and its Enterprise Unified Communications partners will offer a secure, highly scalable, and differentiated enterprise package that includes Jott services; and
• Nuance will leverage Jott for Salesforce—which provides open application programming interfaces that allow for voice integration with third-party customer relationship management (CRM) providers and other critical enterprise applications that require mobile access—and continue to expand the CRM partner program.

Shree Madhavapeddi, co-founder of Jott—who, along with the company’s other co-founder, John Pollard, will be joining the Nuance Mobile Leadership Team—notes that Nuance and Jott have similar visions for the mobile space.

All of Jott’s services, including Jott Assistant, Jott Voicemail, and Jott for Salesforce, will remain available, and existing customers will experience no interruptions in service, according to Nuance.