Enriching its feature list for carriers and their enterprise customers, Metaswitch has tapped Nuance for speech-to-text transcription of voice mail within its unified communications products. The transcription features will be available to users of Metaswitch’s flagship CommPortal platform, which offers a single site for retrieving and managing messages over wireline and mobile phones, smartphones, laptops, fax machines and so on.
The Nuance technology will allow those CommPortal users to convert voice-mail messages into SMS texts or e-mail, and deliver them to the device of their choosing. Metaswitch’s operator customers can roll out the new service within their existing Metaswitch contracts.
In a statement, Robert Pettiford, AVP of commercial products at Frontier Communications, pronounced his company “thrilled” to see Metaswitch offering an integrated speech-to-text system.
Based in Burlington, Mass., Nuance is one of the leading providers of speech-to-text applications, and counts major carriers, including AT&T, among its customers. Metaswitch, which serves hundreds of Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators in North America, opens up new markets for Nuance.
Adding to its three historic lines of business – VoIP gear, application servers, and protocol stacks – Metaswitch acquired AppTrigger in March to move into the rapidly expanding market for service brokers. Last month the company said it had added features to its service-broker product to ease service providers’ transition to next-generation networks and IMS architectures, including baked-in interoperability support, which covers “21 of the major revenue-generating telecom applications,” according to Metaswitch; a service creation environment for XML scripting, which will enable integrators and network managers to easily combine disparate applications; and enhanced SIP compliance.
Since Kevin DeNuccio took over as CEO earlier this year, Metaswitch has reportedly been contemplating an IPO – though the lackluster performance of BroadSoft shares since that company went public last week may cause Metaswitch to hesitate.