InfoSpace announced that it has completed its acquisition of Montreal-based Locus Dialogue Inc., a developer of speech recognition-enabled applications.
According to company officials, the move was made in to position InfoSpace to speech-enable a wide variety of its existing wireless offerings, such as personalized information, location-based services, and mobile commerce services.
In addition, officials believe this will allow InfoSpace to develop other unique mobile applications, such as speech-activated dialing.
“We are delighted to add Locus Dialogue’s best-of-breed speech recognition technologies to InfoSpace’s wireless platform, as there is considerable value in our being able to offer speech-enabled applications to InfoSpace’s growing base of wireless carriers and other customers worldwide,” says Arun Sarin, InfoSpace CEO. “We are also thrilled to add Locus Dialogue’s world-class engineering team, as we share highly compatible visions and together will lead the development and distribution of the world’s leading speech-enabled applications.”
Locus Dialogue’s core speech technologies and speech-enabled applications, which have been in development for more than 14 years, provide automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, speaker verification, speaker identification, and text-to-speech server technology.
They also support grammar object framework, which provides solutions based on alphanumeric data, including dates, times, monetary values, zip codes, and telephone numbers.
Locus Dialogue will continue to be based in Montreal.