Nokia is signing a multi-year deal worth “tens of millions of dollars” with Nuance Communications in an unusual arrangement, where Nokia will not only license Nuance’s speech-recognition and predictive text technologies to use internally, but also to make them available to developers working with Nokia (NYSE: NOK). Michael Thompson, GM for Nuance’s mobile business unit, said in an interview that the deal is being called “the Open Interface Framework,” however declined to give many specifics about the program, including when it would launch and whether developers would have to pay a fee to participate.

Nokia already partners with Nuance to use various technologies, including predictive text, voice dialing and read-back technology, but going forward the arrangement allows them to tap into other technologies that would integrate with their content side of the business. That potentially includes “dictation—both email and SMS—mobile search, navigation, and mobile music search,” Thompson said. “There’s quite a lot.”

In regards to the Open Interface Framework side of the announcement, Thompson said Nokia developers will have access to Nuance technologies through APIs. Thompson explained that Nuance’s interest in the deal was two-fold: there’s economic benefit to Nuance over time, although he would not elaborate on what that means, and because a deal of this kind can raise awareness for Nuance and increase developer interest. Thompson: “If you look at the marketplace today, with some of the announcements about the iPhone, Android and even Nokia themselves, there’s a strong trend in the market towards open, innovation and developer-friendliness. It taps into that strategic trend that’s happening in the mobile market, which has accelerated dramatically in the last 12 months. Nokia is a leader in that area, and we want to participate with them.”