Nuance Communications is the name of the hugely popular player that deals with voice recognition software. Some of you might know that Siri came to the iPhone 4S after the company licensed its technology to Apple. And Siri’s success added to the popularity of Nuance’s software, which is now being used in a whole lot of apps for various purposes.

So all is well for Nuance after Siri – it just needs to become bigger now. The company traditionally sells its speech recognition software to healthcare and financial companies. In September, it started offering free tools to mobile developers for building applications using Nuance’s speech recognition software.

Nuance feels it is a way to seed the market with their voice recognition technology. Thanks to Nuances move, the world has a host of apps using which users can shop, search, play games, or otherwise use their phones through voice alone.

Before Nuances change in strategy, mobile developers had to pay about a penny each time the voice recognition software was being made use of by the users through their app. In turn, the customers were charged a per-use fee. But now things have changed for good.

Apps using Nuance software can be sold at cheap rates. Sonico and its translation app called iTranslate Voice, is among the beneficiaries. Austrian startup pays a flat rate for every app that’s downloaded instead of a per-use fee.

The app can translate what a user says in 30 different languages and costs 99 cents. It has been downloaded more than 500,000 times.

Nuance’s new rates made it possible to sell apps for cheap, says Alexander Marktl of Sonico Mobile. He went on to say that the earlier situation would be too dangerous for small developers, because if their app was too popular, the costs would explode.

Sales of voice recognition software for wireless devices should reach $21.3 billion by 2018, up from $3.5 billion last year, according to tech analysts WinterGreen Research.

There are about 140 new apps powered by Nuance’s technology and there are about a thousand more in the pipeline. It simply means more revenue for Nuance.