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"Voice-recognition giant Nuance announced on Tuesday that it is acquiring Vlingo, the creator of a voice-to-text and voice recognition app that has been the subject of various Nuance lawsuits over patent infringement. \nBut with the growth of virtual assistant and voice-enabled capabilities such as Apple\u2019s Siri, Nuance and Vlingo are putting their differences aside to join forces.\n\"Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding,\" Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan said in a statement. \"As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers.\"\nAlthough this is a different tone from what we\u2019ve heard from the companies in the past, it\u2019s clear they both have their sights set on battling Siri and a combined effort is a strong place to start.\nNuance cited that a main reason for the acquisition is a \"$5 billion market opportunity\" that spans phones, PCs, tablets , cars, music players and navigation devices, and it plans to integrate natural language interfaces across these areas and devices.\nWith the gaining popularity of voice-recognition software, a report surfaced last week that Google may also be working on a voice-recognition assistant for Android under the codename of Majel. In addition, Google recently announced that it acquired a company called Clever Sense, the maker of the app Alfred, which serves as a digital personal assistant. \n\"Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple\u2019s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services,\" Mike Thompson, svp and general manager of Nuance Mobile, said in a statement. \"By acquiring Vlingo, we are able to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet this demand.\"\nThe terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, and the announcement did not address its legal history with Vlingo."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/12/20/nuance-acquires-vling/>