Nuance Powers AT&T Voicemail to Text

Nuance Communications and AT&T are teaming up and making it easier to access and reply to mobile voicemail.

With this partnership, Nuance’s Voicemail to Text platform is powering the recently launched AT&T Voicemail to Text—a service that converts English and Spanish wireless voicemail messages to text and delivers them via SMS, email, or both.

According to John Pollard, general manager at Nuance, the solution will save customers time and allow them to discretely check voicemail messages.

“Both of those things are very, very important to our customers,” he says.

Nuance’s Voicemail to Text platform leverages the company’s speech recognition engine and comprehensive hosted transcription services. 

“Our service was built with carriers like AT&T and their subscribers in mind—an incredibly reliable and scalable voicemail to text infrastructure, and a valuable and easy-to-use service for mobile consumers,” said Michael Thompson, senior vice president of Nuance Mobile, in a statement.

Pollard says the deal came about due to Nuance’s solid relationship with AT&T and its reputation, both for quality speech recognition and successfully working with tier one carriers.

“It was a natural combination. We can offer quality now and a great roadmap in the future,” says Pollard, noting that doing business with a tier one carrier is very different than working with a smaller carrier, an enterprise, or an individual end user.

“What’s important about this for Nuance is that [AT&T is] an extremely large carrier—one of the largest in the world,” he says.

Ryan Joe, a research analyst at Ovum, agrees with this assessment: “This is a significant deal with a major carrier.  That AT&T has selected Nuance’s [speech-to-text] platform is powerful validation of the vendor’s technology.”