Speech recognition startup Nuance is suing Yahoo for poaching 13 of its top engineers. This follows the announced acquisition of Nuance two weeks ago by ScanSoft (a company that has been rolling up the voice recognition software space since it bought up Lernout & Hauspie's Dragon Systems four years ago). The 13 engineers in question are well-regarded within the industry as the "gods of voice recognition," one source tells me.
Now, file this next bit under unsubstantiated rumor, but supposedly a few months ago Google quietly hired away another one of Nuance's top technical guys, who later recruited two more Nuance engineers to Google. When Yahoo heard about this, Jerry Yang personally swooped in to help recruit the rest of the team to Yahoo before Google could get them. They (obviously) were not interested in working for ScanSoft.
The lawsuit raises the question of how valuable Nuance is to ScanSoft without this core team of killer engineers. (Why the team is valuable to Yahoo I can only guess, but adding voice recognition capabilities to Yahoo Mobile would make a lot of sense). It also raises the same sorts of questions that we saw with Microsoft's poaching lawsuit against Google: how far can a company go in laying claim to an employee's brainpower?
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