Voice recognition and contextual information are starting to become focal points on a smartphone, allowing phone owners to use the device as a personal assistant, taking in all the user’s information using voice recognition and offering different types of information at the right time.
On all three major mobile platforms there is a voice recognition service. On Android both Google and Samsung have their own, Google Now and S Voice, although S Voice only runs on TouchWiz devices.
Samsung might be looking for more than just a partnership with Nuance Communications and the rumor mill claims the South Korean electronics giant is looking to acquire the voice recognition company.
The deal is currently still being negotiated and we doubt Nuance are really in the mood to be acquired, considering they are the biggest voice recognition developers and have hundreds of clients in their portfolio, most would likely disappear if they went with Samsung.
Samsung does have a lot of money available though, $39 billion according to reports in 2013. The company also said they were willing to spend a lot of their saved up cash on big multi-billion acquisitions and R&D for their business to grow even further.
This is not the first time Nuance has been approached by a large company, rumors said Apple was in the running a short time after Siri had been developed, but Nuance declined the offer. This might come back to bite Apple, if Samsung manages to offer them a better deal.
Nuance Communications makes around $3 billion in revenue, but we expect an acquisition offer to be much larger than $3 billion. Samsung could end up spending somewhere in the region of $8 billion for this company and even then Nuance might not accept the terms.
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