SpeechWorks

» see speechworks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

SpeechWorks is one of the few graves here that nobody gets to claim, including the millions of people who used it every week. It sold engines to companies, and the companies put their own brand on the result. When an American rental car line in 2002 asked which airport you were flying into and actually understood the answer, that was SpeechWorks underneath, uncredited.

None of that reached me. The automated lines I called in Turkey spoke Turkish and ran on somebody else's software, and a Boston company selling recognition engines to FedEx had no consumer surface at all. You only find this name by going looking for who owned the patents.

Mike Phillips and Bill O'Farrell started it in 1994 as Applied Language Technologies. The pitch was narrow on purpose. Not dictation on a desktop, where Dragon and Lernout & Hauspie were already fighting, but recognition good enough to sit on a telephone line and replace a menu tree. Carriers and voice portals were the buyers, and the end user never signed anything.

What made it feel different in 1999 was barge-in. The software would start reading you a list of options and you could cut it off mid-sentence with your answer, which no phone menu had ever permitted. It also used a prompt voice that sounded like a person rather than a synthesizer, and it fed vocabulary back into its own model from the calls it had already taken.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

FedEx and Amtrak ran caller lines on it. Thrifty used it to quote rental prices over the phone and then surveyed the people who had called, and 90 percent said the automated line met or beat what they had expected from one. In 2002 that was a startling number, because everyone's honest expectation of a phone robot was zero.

The company went public in 2000 and tripled in value. That same year it paid 17 million dollars for Eloquent Technology of Ithaca, which is where the text-to-speech half came from, and shipped it as Speechify. AOL built AOL by Phone on top of Quack.com and pointed the recognition at Speechify, then in 2002 bought five million dollars of SpeechWorks stock, roughly one percent of the company.

~ the funny part ~

In early 2003 the National Weather Service put Speechify voices on NOAA Weather Radio. For the next thirteen years the machine reading tornado warnings across the United States was a Boston startup's text-to-speech engine, still talking under a company name that had stopped existing in 2003. It was finally replaced in 2016 by a different system.

~ the actual end ~

ScanSoft announced the purchase on 24 April 2003 at about 132 million dollars and closed it on 11 August. By closing the figure had moved to roughly 175.5 million, paid in stock at 0.86 ScanSoft shares for every SpeechWorks share, about 32.5 million new shares issued. ScanSoft was assembling a speech monopoly one purchase at a time and this was the biggest piece it had taken so far.

Two years later ScanSoft bought Nuance and took the acquired company's name. Microsoft announced its purchase of Nuance in 2021 and closed it in 2022 for about 19.7 billion dollars. The engine that answered rental car calls in 2002 now belongs to Microsoft, four owners downstream, and at every single one of those handovers the brand was the first thing thrown away.

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