Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) has announced today that they are powering voice recognition capabilities for the Askc.om iPhone app. Nuance’s voice recognition technology is also being used on the Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search apps. “The voice-to-text feature really resonates with users, and makes the whole question asking experience on a mobile device easier than ever,” stated Ask.com SVP of Products Tony Gentile. [Nuance PR]

The poaching continues!  Microsoft Corporation has just hired Larry Heck from Yahoo!  Heck was a VP of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo! Labs.  Now Heck will be reporting to Satya Nadella, SVP of the online services division at Microsoft.

Before Yahoo!, Heck received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and worked at Stanford’s Research Institute.  Heck also was VP of R&D at Nuance Communications.  “We look forward to welcoming him to the team,” wrote Microsoft in a statement.  Other executives that Microsoft recently poached from Yahoo! recently include Qi Lu, Sean Suchter, and Scot Moore.

Yahoo! was sued by Nuance after Heck quit.  Nuance claimed that Heck poached a dozen workers from their company to join Yahoo!  It’ll be interesting to see if any of those workers leave Yahoo! for Microsoft now.

[via Bloomberg]