Nuance snaps up SNAPin for $180M

Speech recognition firm Nuance Communications acquired SNAPin, which makes self-service customer care solutions for handsets, for $180 million in Nuance stock. The deal is expected to close in October.

Nuance plans to leverage SNAPin's intellectual property to develop Web-based self service customer care for mobile consumers. The company says that a Nuance/SNAPin integration will allow Nuance to reduce the costs of customer care and improve the quality of the customer experience for operators and enterprises.

But SNAPin isn't Nuance's only acquisition target. Last week the company made a $40.4 million offer to acquire Zi Corp., which makes a mobile phone software to help people send more grammatically correct text messages and emails by predicting their typing habits and correcting commonly misspelled words. Zi Corp. rebuffed the offer and said it wouldn't negotiate with Nuance.

For more:
- see this press release

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