In an effort to provide mobile device users an easier and more natural way to control their applications, AT&T* and Vlingo today announced a licensing agreement and strategic alliance to incorporate AT&T's Watson technology into Vlingo's speech-enabled applications. The alliance will drive innovation in user interfaces by allowing people to use the power of their voice to create and send a text message or email, search the Web, access social networking tools and more, making data services more accessible and convenient to use. As part of the alliance, AT&T will take a minority equity stake in Vlingo.

"AT&T's Watson technology provides a world-class speech recognition engine in both performance and features," said Charles Kalmanek, vice president of networking and services research, AT&T Labs. "By allowing users to speak naturally, Watson opens the door to a wide range of innovative new services that are easy and natural to use."

Added Dave Grannan, president and CEO, Vlingo: "This agreement represents a unique opportunity to work with AT&T to deliver a revolutionary speech recognition solution to the market. Natural and unconstrained voice recognition user interfaces represent the next major breakthrough for the mobile industry as well as many other industries. Based on our evaluation, we have seen significant accuracy and performance gains with Watson compared to other core speech technologies that will allow us to create a dramatically improved user experience. We look forward to deploying our joint solutions throughout the industry."

A leader in speech technology for decades, AT&T is a pioneer in voice-enabled services and has developed hundreds of voice applications deployed throughout our advanced telecommunications network. AT&T's Watson speech recognition technology includes the latest advances and innovations in the field of speech and language processing with a rich set of tools for custom development and adaptation of acoustic and language models. In addition to Watson, AT&T's suite of speech technologies also includes AT&T Natural Voices, an award-winning text-to-speech product that converts text into voice for a wide variety of applications.