Nuance Communications Inc 's

The several markets in which we compete are highly competitive and are subject to rapid technology changes. There are a number of companies that develop or may develop solutions and technologies that compete in our target markets; however, currently there is no one company that directly competes with us across all of our solutions and technologies. While we expect competition to continue to increase both from existing competitors and new market entrants, we believe that we will compete effectively based on many factors, including:

Specialized Professional Services. Our superior technology, when coupled with the high quality and domain knowledge of our professional services organization, allows our customers and partners to place a high degree of confidence and trust in our ability to deliver results. We support our customers in designing and building powerful innovative applications that specifically address their needs and requirements.

International Coverage. The international reach of our solutions and technologies is due to the broad language coverage of our offerings, including our voice recognition and natural language understanding solutions, which provide recognition for approximately 70 languages and dialects and natural-sounding synthesized speech in over 160 voices, and support a broad range of hardware platforms and operating systems. Our imaging technology supports more than 120 languages for OCR and document handling, with up to 20 screen language choices, including Asian languages.

Technological Superiority. Our voice recognition, NLU and imaging technologies, applications and solutions are often recognized as the most innovative and proficient in their respective categories. Our voice recognition and NLU solutions have industry-leading recognition accuracy and provide a natural, voice-enabled interaction with systems, devices and applications. Our OCR technology in our Imaging segment is viewed as the most accurate in the industry. Technology publications, analyst research and independent benchmarks have consistently indicated that our solutions and technologies rank at or above performance levels of alternative solutions.

Broad Distribution Channels. Our ability to address the needs of specific markets, such as financial, law, healthcare and government, and to introduce new solutions and technologies quickly and effectively is provided by our direct sales force, our extensive global network of resellers, comprising system integrators, independent software vendors, value-added resellers, hardware vendors, telecommunications carriers and distributors, and our e-commerce website.

We compete with companies such as Adobe, Google, iFlyTek, LivePerson, M*Modal, Optum and 3M. In addition, a number of smaller companies offer solutions, technologies or products that are competitive with our solutions and technologies in the voice recognition, natural language understanding, text input and imaging markets. In certain markets, some of our partners such as Avaya, Cisco, Convergys, and Genesys develop and market products and services that might be considered substitutes for our solutions and technologies. Current and potential competitors have established, or may establish, cooperative relationships among themselves or with third parties to increase the ability of their technologies to address the needs of our prospective customers.

Some of our competitors or potential competitors, such as Adobe, Google, and 3M, have significantly greater financial, technical and marketing resources than we do. These competitors may be able to respond more rapidly than we can to new or emerging technologies or changes in customer requirements. They may also devote greater resources to the development, promotion and sale of their products than we do.