| Acquired by | Nuance Communications |
| Date | 12/11 |
| Website | vlingo.com |
| Blog | blog.vlingo.com |
| @vlingo | |
| Category | Mobile/Wireless |
| Phone | (617) 283-2285 |
| info@vlingo.com | |
| Employees | |
| Founded | 6/06 |
| Description | Voice enabled Virtual Assistant |
| TOTAL | $26.5M |
| FUNDING TOTAL | $26.5M |
| Series A, 12/06 Charles River Ventures Sigma Partners | $6.5M |
| Series B, 4/08 Yahoo! Charles River Ventures Sigma Partners | $20M |
| Venture Round, 9/09 AT&T |
Vlingo is a Virtual Assistant that turns your words into action by combining voice to text technology, natural language processing, and Vlingo’s Intent Engine to understand the user’s intent and take the appropriate action. Simply speak to your phone to connect with the people, businesses and activities that are important to you.
The team behind the service has some significant experience in the speech recognition space. The two co-founders (Mike Phillips and John Nguyen) worked for SpeechWorks, which was acquired by ScanSoft, which then renamed itself Nuance. Nuance most recently paid $293 million for VoiceSignal, a company using speech recognition for mobile search in 21 languages.
| Website | vlingo.com |
| Stage | Live |
| Tags | voicetotext, text, voice, mobile, phone |
Vlingo’s system starts with a basic statistical language model to make the best guess about what you say. It then improves upon that by taking into account context, and positive and negative user feedback down to the individual. Context helps the system by narrowing the number of possible words you said. For instance, if the context is an address, the number of possible street names is limited to the ones in the city. User feedback correcting the system’s output or leaving it be helps the system learn how you speak (e.g correcting Austin to Boston).
