SpinVox was once the darling of the UK business media, having attracted around £100 million ($158 million) in venture capital funding, and was touted as a rare UK technology start up success story.

The company garnered controversy, however, when the BBC reported that its service, which converts voicemail messages into text, relied more on human transcription than it had lead customers to believe.

Nuance Communications, the company behind the desktop speech recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking, is itself the result of a number of mergers and acquisitions, most notably that of Nuance and ScanSoft in 2005.

‘Around the world, the voice-to-text market has experienced tremendous growth over the last year, with a variety of innovative services being delivered by carriers and unified communications providers,’ said John Pollard, Nuance’s vice president for voice-to-text in a press statement.