Just like Netflix, Berkshire and Activision - I love this stock for 5+ years so it stays on my list.

Nuance Communications was brought to my attention about a year ago by a hot shot stock picker who attended a course I delivered 2 years earlier. The company's products were brought to his attention by his father, a Dublin barrister who mentioned that his Dragon speech-recognition software was a remarkable addition to his office and practice. Kenneth did a little digging and presented me with a company that had a business plan which on the surface was only too familiar.

In the dot bomb stock market meltdown of 2000 I held shares in a Belgian company called Lernout & Hauspie. L&H had bought Dragon from a husband and wife team for $600m merely months before they fell like a rock into liquidation from their $10+ billion market capitalisation. Over the following six years, a company called ScanSoft bought the Dragon system along with around 10 other strategic acquisitions in the speech recognition area, re-branding to Nuance along the way. Their most recent acquisition in February '06 was of the Dictaphone Corporation.

The principle reason that I'm a fan of Nuance is that they are dominant in a very future-relevant industry and their products work extremely well. Over the next 5 years there is absolutely no doubt that voice recognition software will creep into services and devices we use every day - from your car to PC. I'm betting that the majority of these devices will be listening thanks to Nuance Comms. A closing word of warning, this is going to be a volatile stock that could as easily fall 40% in a year as rise 60%

Emmet owns shares in Nuance Communications.