Music to Your Ears: The Echo Nest Joins Forces with Nuance's Intelligent Voice Technology

SOMERVILLE, Mass., Sept. 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- The Echo Nest, the industry's leading music intelligence company, today announced that its Dynamic Music Data solution will roll out globally in a variety of products from Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the world's leading provider of voice and natural language understanding technology, to enhance its Natural Language Understanding (NLU) framework within the music domain and provide an enhanced music experience new customers around the world.

Nuance will use The Echo Nest's Dynamic Music Data solution to create new and unique entertainment experiences across a broad range of devices including smartphones, tablets, cars, computers, and other consumer electronics devices in multiple regions worldwide. The Echo Nest has the largest and most relevant music database in the world, making the company a key strategic source of music intelligence for its partners. 

"Bringing together The Echo Nest's deep understanding of music content and music fans with Nuance's expertise in voice and natural language technology is a powerful combination," said Jim Lucchese, CEO of The Echo Nest. "We're pleased to partner with Nuance to deliver better products to their customers, allowing users to interact with, discover, play, and enjoy music in a wide variety of more engaging and innovative application of voice-enabled technologies.

Access to The Echo Nest's music intelligence will also further enhance Nuance's music-focused NLU to understand what people want when they ask for a song, album, or artist with greater accuracy. To that end, The Echo Nest will provide Nuance with attributes for recording artists including popularity, similarity, musical style, and more, improving Nuance's ability to provide an interactive music experience that can play the precise music a particular user has requested, converse with the user, and offer related content using only the voice.

The Echo Nest's unique approach to understanding both music content (machine listening) and music fans (cultural analysis) has made the company the global leader in music discovery. Further, its Dynamic Music Data solution is quickly becoming a new standard in online music data, severing several of the top 10 most popular online music properties and reaching hundreds of millions of fans each month. 

About The Echo Nest
The Echo Nest is the industry's leading music intelligence company, providing developers with the deepest understanding of music content and music fans.

Leading music services (Clear Channel's iHeartradio, MOG, Rdio, SiriusXM, Spotify), editorial, video and social media networks (BBC.com, Foursquare, MTV, Twitter, VEVO, Yahoo!), connected device manufacturers (Buongiorno, doubleTwist, Nokia) and big brands (Coca-Cola, Intel, Microsoft, Reebok) access the largest repository of music data and intelligence through our open API to build smarter music experiences that help fans to better discover, share and interact with the music they love. The Echo Nest's customer base reaches over 100 million music fans every month and over 400 applications have been built on The Echo Nest platform.

Headquartered in Somerville, MA, The Echo Nest was co-founded by two MIT PhDs. Investors include Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and three co-founders of the MIT Media Lab.

For more information, please visit www.echonest.com.

About Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance's proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

SOURCE The Echo Nest