As in last year’s rankings, though, the company continues to excel in product innovation, research, and development. The company fell off the leaderboard this year, ranking just slightly behind Nuance. "You can plug it into almost anything, especially if it’s compatible with a Unix or Linux operating system," Gilbert says. Like Nuance and Loquendo, IBM also scored very high in the accuracy of its speech engines, pulling in a 4.1 rating there, and in its ability to customize and integrate solutions. Loquendo also scored very high in customer satisfaction, customization, integration, and innovation, and analysts painted a rosy picture for the company as it continues to open new markets and uses for the technology. The company boasts nearly 60 voices in a total of 23 world languages. "For European languages in particular, they are great," Hura says. In accuracy, only Nuance and Voxeo scored higher, but neither could compare to Loquendo in the number and variety of languages and voices available.
Loquendo captured the highest scores in all evaluation criteria except one. Despite all of these changes, the Italian company retains the top spot in 2008. The past 12 months have seen great changes at Loquendo, which welcomed a new CEO in Davide Franco, opened new offices in New York, and underwent an organizational change resulting in a new marketing and business development division. It has seen especially strong growth in its healthcare dictation business, and expects to ship its technologies on more than 800 mobile phones this year. But despite its high cost, it has more than 5,000 customers for its speech engines, and revenue has grown by approximately 20 percent for each of the past three years. As in last year’s evaluations, Nuance again fell far short in the area of cost. The company also scored high in customization and integration, company reputation, and overall customer satisfaction. "I don’t think anyone can touch them here." "Nuance’s accuracy is fantastic," says Susan Hura, vice president of user experience at Product Support Solutions. Nuance Communications scored an industry-leading 4.71 in accuracy, almost eight-tenths of a point higher than its closest competitors. With a number of key strategic partnerships in place, LumenVox "shows a huge openness to work with others and go outside itself to get the greatest deal for its customers," observes Juan Gilbert, a computer science professor at Auburn University. LumenVox garnered high marks for its ability to tailor solutions to specific user needs and overall customer satisfaction. What’s more, its pricing model allows users to prototype the application before buying it, so they "know what they’re getting before they make an investment," says Robin Springer, president of ComputerTalk. Its speech engine sells for between $100 and $400 per port, prompting our analysts and consultants to give LumenVox high marks for affordability. LumenVox is a newcomer to our leaderboard, but it has slowly gained market share and customers. One could say the market has matured, but new advances in natural language processing, expanded vocabularies, new language capabilities, new uses for the technology, and improved audio output show that this is a market still fraught with potential. Many of these firms have a strong presence in emerging Asian and Eastern European markets, highlighting the technology’s vital role among developing nations. Merger and acquisition activity continued, but several new vendors have emerged and others have expanded their roster of speech offerings, adding a handful of new firms to those considered for this award. The number of devices with embedded speech recognition technology has also increased steadily. The Market: Throughout 2007 and the first half of 2008, the number and size of speech recognition deployments continued to spike as companies have become more familiar with the technology and its capabilities. Speech Technology Magazine's Reference Guide.Speech Technology Case Studies and Market Spotlights.
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