Nuance website may leave you tongue-tied

Nuance Communications Inc., a Burlington company specializing in voice-recognition software, has debuted a marketing website designed to generate some holiday buzz for its DragonNaturallySpeaking line of products, its ad agency said today.

The ad agency is Mullen, which is headquartered in Wenham, and Mullen has just unveiled a website at www.frozenpole.com that is designed to be amusing and entertaining. Visitors to the site experience a digitally animated frozen world of Eskimos and penguins where funny looking people sport about and seek to got their tongues stuck to frigid metal poles in creative and unusual ways. Mullen provided the image that appears above this post.

At first glance, there would seem to be little connection between such antics and speech recognition software, other than the fact that most people would need to have their tongues unstuck from cold metal to make good use of DragonNaturallySpeaking.

According to a Nuance website, folks who buy DragonNaturallySpeaking software for their personal computers can "turn talk into type" and perform such tasks as operating their computer mouse or creating word documents and sending e-mails simply by dictation.

In any case, visitors to www.frozenpole.com may experience such a soft sell for the Nuance product that the sales pitch might seem subtle at best.

That's fine by Mullen. One of the latest trends in digital marketing, a Mullen spokesman said, is to design entertaining websites and then get across the message that this entertaining experience has been brought to you by the company responsible for the site. The hope is that such websites generate so much buzz and good will for the company as to make such projects worthwhile.
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)