Far Behind
Demands for techniques that make use of smart voice recognition are on the rise around the world as the big data and cloud computing industries are growing at a rapid pace nowadays.
According to industry sources, the global smart voice recognition market is estimated to grow to US$10.5 billion until 2017 while five U.S. companies accounted for more than 80% of the market last year.
Specifically, Nuance Communications recorded a market share of 31.6% in it last year, followed by Google (28.4%), Apple (15.4%), Microsoft (8.1%) and IBM (4.1%). iFLYTEK, a Chinese company that participated in the development of Samsung Electronics’ S Voice and LG Electronics’ Q Voice, took up 4.5% of the market during the same period.
In the meantime, South Korean companies filed 7,526 smart voice patent applications between July 2014 and June 2015 while the numbers of those filed by Chinese, U.S., Japanese and European companies were 5,855, 28,726, 27,037 and 10,725 during the period, respectively. Smart voice patents are divided into source technology patents and product patents. The former cover speech-to-text conversion techniques, speaker detection and the like. Nuance Communications is currently taking the lead in the source technology segment.