Vlingo

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

~ the goodbye ~

vlingo was the kind of thing you read about in tech press in 2009 to 2011 and then forgot. i had a nokia s60 phone and later an android in those years. english voice recognition with a turkish accent in 2010 was a category that did not work for me yet. i never installed vlingo. the demos felt like a magic trick on stage and a fight with the microphone in real life. the wider story was more interesting than the app, because vlingo was one of the small speech companies whose lab work fed every voice assistant that came after.

mike phillips and john nguyen founded vlingo in cambridge massachusetts on june 1 2006. phillips was a long-time speech engineer who had worked at nuance's predecessor before. the pitch was natural-language voice control for smartphones. you held a button, spoke a query like "text my wife i'll be late", and the phone executed the action. vlingo shipped builds for symbian, blackberry, android, and iphone, which made it one of the few pre-iphone voice apps with broad device coverage. handset makers licensed it as a built-in feature. samsung, rim and nokia all shipped vlingo-derived voice control on at least one mainline product.

the company spent three years in a patent fight with nuance over speech-to-text patents. vlingo won the first jury trial in 2010. nuance kept litigating. in late 2011 nuance gave up and bought the company instead, announcing the deal on december 20 2011. press estimates put the total around two hundred million dollars in cash plus stock. by the end of 2012 the standalone vlingo brand was wound down. the technology fed directly into the speech stack that nuance was already licensing to apple for siri, which gave vlingo's engineering a strange double life inside siri without the brand being acknowledged.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually did ~

the app exposed a small set of voice commands and a longer set of dictation paths. you could compose a text message, dial a contact, run a web search, post to facebook, or write a memo. the recognition was server-side. audio went up to vlingo's cluster, text came back. on a good connection it returned in under two seconds, which was fast for the era. on a flaky 2g link in central anatolia, the round trip took long enough that you typed the message faster.

~ how nuance took it ~

the nuance deal was less an acquisition than the end of a long lawsuit. nuance had filed patent claims against vlingo as early as 2008. vlingo's win at the first trial cost nuance time and money without delivering the blocking patent injunction nuance wanted. the cheapest way out was to buy the smaller company. the press release framed it as a merger of mobile-speech leaders. the practical effect was nuance owning every meaningful mobile dictation stack in english at once, including the one feeding siri at apple.

~ what came after ~

the team that built vlingo continued at nuance and then mostly scattered when apple, google and amazon built voice assistants in-house. siri eventually moved off nuance entirely. samsung's s voice was sunset when bixby arrived. the visible voice-assistant brands of the 2020s all came later. vlingo's mark on that history is the fact that voice search on a smartphone became a normal expectation between 2009 and 2012, and a meaningful share of the actual speech recognition that made it tolerable came out of a small office in cambridge that does not exist anymore.

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