Carl Icahn boosts holding in Nuance Communications

Billionaire investor Carl Icahn has boosted his holding of Nuance Communications, with the purchase of an additional 50,900 shares.

According to a report in ValueWalk, the stock was acquired earlier this month, at a price of $14.2 per share. This brings Icahn’s total holding in the company to 60,784,623 shares. In October, Icahn gained two seats on Nuance’s board and appointed Brett Icahn and David Schecter.

Reported previously, Nuance has announced a number of recent deployments in the last six months.

Last month, the company announced that Tatra Bank deployed its FreeSpeech voice biometrics solution to authenticate its customers.

Earlier this year, in July, Nuance launched a new generation of its voice biometrics platform, boasting a 50% improvement in accuracy.

Based on a recent Nuance survey of smartphone users, 90% are eager to use voice biometrics for authentication. In addition, the survey found that 85% of respondents are dissatisfied with current authentication methods.

According to a recent report on the voice verification market, the market is in its nascent stages of development, but growth is anticipated as voice biometrics and speech recognition become more widely used. 

In addition, the Biometrics Research Group has noted that mobile devices are expected to drive the bank adoption of voice biometrics, and has also pinpointed that Asia is expected to lead the growth in biometric banking applications.

BiometricUpdate.com recently took a look an extended look at voice biometrics as a modality, including some early examples, as well as an exploration of potential developments and innovations. Read the full feature here.

Article Topics

funding  |  investment  |  Nuance Communications  |  voice