Tegic might not be a household name, but it's a solid bet you've used their software -- the company is responsible for the T9 predictive-text input system that's installed in virtually every cellphone out there. That makes Tegic worth about $265 million, apparently, because that's how much voice-recognition firm Nuance just dished out to Time Warner AOL for the company. (Disclosure: AOL is our parent company's parent company.) Nuance is on a buying spree lately, having bought VoiceSignal, BeVocal, and Dictaphone in the past year -- the goal is apparently to control much of how users interact with their phones, be it voice, touch, or text. Here's hoping Nuance doesn't make any sweeping changes while they chase that rainbow -- at this point we're so hard-wired for T9 that it's difficult to imagine that it's licensed software and not, say, a fundamental property of mathematics. 4663 5825, 4897.

[Via RCRWireless News]

A young lad by the name of Ben Cook might be able to school his pals with his lightning-quick text messaging skillz (he even prefers plain ol' multi-tapping to predictive text) but one company set out to prove that the world's fastest texter is still no match for voice recognition. Nuance Communications is gearing up to release its Mobile Speech Platform to carriers -- a system that'll ultimately allow users to dictate SMSes, among other tasks -- and they obviously needed some high-profile way to get the word out, like picking on Ben Cook, for example. For the contest, Nuance pitted its software against Mr. Cook and two Nuance employees packing QWERTY and T9 devices, throwing them each this little tidbit of everyday conversation: "The razor toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygo centrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human." Our world record holder finished in 48 seconds -- not bad, considering he was doing it without any predictive assistance -- but the software spanked everyone with just 16 seconds on the clock. Now we just need to take a hard look at why one would dictate an SMS (versus, say, placing a phone call) and we'll be jumping right on the bandwagon.