NuanceCommunications
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Personal assistants are ushering in the age of AI at home
Google Home is the latest embodiment of a virtual assistant. The voice-activated speaker can help you make a dinner reservation, remind you to catch your flight, fire up your favorite playlist and even translate words for you on the fly. While the voice interface is expected to make quotidian tasks easier, it also gives the company unprecedented access to human patterns and preferences that are crucial to the next phase of artificial intelligence. Comparing an AI agent to a personal assistant, as most companies have been doing of late, makes for a powerful metaphor. It is one that is indicative of the human capabilities that most major technology companies want their disembodied helpers to adopt. Over the last couple of years, with improvements in speech-recognition technology, Siri, Cortana and Google Now have slowly learned to move beyond the basics of weather updates to take on more complex responsibilities like managing your calendar or answering your queries. But products that invade our personal spaces -- like Amazon's Echo and Google Home -- point to a larger shift in human-device interaction that is currently underway.
Latest Swype beta brings hotwords, knows what Gangnam Style is
If you've ever been stymied by your Android keyboard's limited grasp on the latest slanguage, don't quail: Swype's latest beta offering for smartphones or tablets may be your saviour. The latest version of the finger-sliding app will feature "hotwords," that keep up with language trends so that if you opt in to receive dictionary updates, you'll never mistype the latest jargon. The new build also brings two more keyboard layouts for tablets, personal dictionary syncing across all of your Android devices, more themes for personalized keyboard styles and additional language support. So, to avoid any catachresis with that latest tweet, hit the source to see how to grab it.
BMW's 3 and 7 Series to be the first with Nuance's Dragon Drive! Messaging aboard
It somehow feels like it was only yesterday that Nuance unveiled its Dragon Drive! creation to the world, hoping to in the process make drivers' lives easier by delivering a fresh eyes / hands-free messaging system inside connected cars. Unfortunately, back then the savvy company didn't announce any partnerships with auto manufacturers -- still, we had a feeling it wouldn't be too long before one of them would want to come along for the voice dictation ride. The good news is, that's about to change pretty soon. Per the outfit itself, BMW's decided to bring the Dragon Drive! tech to its 2012 7 Series later this month, with the 3 Series Touring and the eco-friendly 3 Series ActiveHybrid expected to get it "later this year." Notably, Dragon Drive! will offer multi-language support, including English, Spanish, Italian, French and German. There's no word yet on just how much the fee for the service will be, but we do know those who land themselves one of these new Beemers will get a two-month trial to take Dragon Drive! for a quick spin.
Nuance takes credit for voice features inside Samsung's 2012 Smart TV lineup
Back at this year's eventful CES, Nuance announced it was launching a platform to bring voice recognition services to connected TVs, among other devices. Now, just a few months later, the communications outfit's taking credit for the voice features packed inside Sammy's 2012 Smart TVs. Essentially, this means those speaking commands used to control the Smart Hub, applications like Skype and even web surfing are all powered by Nuance's Dragon technology. The move itself isn't a surprising one, given Nuance's credibility within the industry. So, now you know who's making it all happen the next time you're telling that ES8000 what to do.
Nuance gobbles up Vlingo, yearns to transcribe its own announcement
Apparently, if you can't (legally) beat them, you buy them. Such is the thinking over at Nuance, who has decided to acquire its competitor and former courtroom dance partner, Vlingo. Should make for some nice additions to the former's voice recognition tubes -- technology which powers everything from Apple's Siri, Dragon dictation and even various autos. No indications as to how many greenbacks exchanged hands, but the newlyweds were happy to boast their "complementary research and development efforts" will result in a company "stronger together than alone." We'll have to see about that. PR after the break.
Nuance adds WP7 support, gives devs better service with NDEV Mobile developer program
You know Nuance right? They're the folks who make Dragon speech recognition software for Macs, iThings, Blackberrys, Androids and cars. Earlier this year, the company released its Dragon Mobile SDK to provide the tools needed to get folks talking to their phones, instead of with them. Now, Nuance has added support for Windows Phone 7 (no Mango support... yet) and upgraded its developer program to provide devs with more support so it's easier to make voice-enabled applications. Additionally, it's added eight new languages to its repertoire -- Canadian French, Americas Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Taiwanese Mandarin, and Cantonese -- with more to come. We got to speak with Nuance about its new program, now called NDEV Mobile, and were told it's broken into three tiers: Silver, Gold, and Emerald. NDEV Silver is the base level that gives devs free access to Nuance's text-to-speech and voice recognition technology. Gold service provides SSL data encryption and access to cloud-based speech recognition and TTS servers over the web (rather than using a client-side API) through per-user or per-transaction pricing models. At the top end, the Emerald level rolls out the red carpet with integrated custom vocabulary and grammar -- for creating apps that recognize industry jargon -- and dedicated account management. The company sees the Emerald tier appealing most to enterprise customers, but it's available to any dev willing to pony up for the extra Nuance TLC. So, intrepid app-makers, now that you've got the tools to make our phones understand us better than ever, how will you use them?
Nuance opens Dragon Mobile SDK to app developers, we see end to embarrassing dictation
There are some messages that are just too embarrassing to dictate to a human being. Lucky for us and the retired circus contortionist we hired to type up our missives, Nuance is expanding the reach of its transcription software by making its Dragon Mobile SDK available to developers for use in iOS and Android applications. The SDK, which is free to members of the Nuance Mobile Developer Program, sports speech-to-text capabilities in eight languages and text-to-speech in 35. There are already apps out there that can do the job, including Nuance's own Dragon Dictation, but we welcome new advances in automated transcription. You know, it's not exactly a walk in the park dictating an entire Clay Aiken Fan Club newsletter to a guy named Sid the Human Pretzel.
Dragon Gaming Speech Pack set to bypass complex keystrokes
Ready to use your voice for something other than barking raid orders or bantering pop culture references over your guild's Vent server? Nuance Communications has announced what it hopes is the next wave in PC gaming: voice command sets. The new Dragon Gaming Speech Pack enables gamers to bypass complex keystrokes in favor of spoken commands, theoretically making gameplay more intuitive. Currently, the software supports World of Warcraft and Second Life in the MMO space, with a number of lobby and single-player games included as well (Call of Duty Black Ops, Mass Effect 2, and Microsoft Flight Simulator X, to name a few). The software retails for USD $129.99, but Nuance is running a special introductory offer that you can read about at its website.
Nuance acquires MacSpeech
Nuance Communications, the company behind Dragon Dictate and Dragon Search for the iPhone, has acquired MacSpeech, the company that makes MacSpeech Dictate and other voice recognition apps for the Mac platform. The first product from MacSpeech was iListen, which was available until 2008. At that time it was the only speech recognition app that could provide dictation services for the Mac after IBM discontinued ViaVoice. iListen was replaced with MacSpeech Dictate, and the company licensed the Dragon recognition engine created by Nuance for the program. MacSpeeech Dictate was a big improvement over iListen, but it still wasn't as powerful or as full-featured as the Dragon versions running on the Windows Platform. That's all going to change. Last week I talked with Peter Mahoney, a Senior Vice President at Nuance, who told me the acquisition of MacSpeech will speed up the flow of new features to MacSpeech Dictate. At some point the program will acquire the Dragon name. Mahoney told me we can expect to see a macro scripting language, integrated support for digital recorders, and accuracy improvements. Nuance made a big splash on the iPhone platform with Dragon Dictate [iTunes link] and Dragon Search [iTunes link]. Nuance also provided the speech recognition for Siri [iTunes link], which has received rave reviews.
2010 BMWs boast improved Nuance voice control system
BMWs aren't exactly lacking for technology these days, but it looks like the new 2010 models come packing a little something extra to make your life even easier. As Nuance Communications is all too happy to announce itself, the new vehicles boast an improved voice control system from the company that promises to allow for a "more conversational dialogue between drivers and BMW navigation and entertainment systems." That, naturally, gets paired with BMW's own iDrive system, and includes some Sync-like abilities to search for music by voice, as well as a new "One-Shot Destination Entry" feature to let folks enter a destination address in one simple voice command. It can even apparently recognize several different language in parallel, letting a French-speaking driver, for instance, search for a German song title or English album title.
T-Mobile attempts to mitigate customer service costs with Nuance Mobile Care
In a growing effort to keep costly CSRs from spending entirely too much time trying to explain how to activate a speakerphone over the, um, phone, T-Mobile has inked a deal with Nuance Communications to bring an on-device application to select mobiles. Essentially, the Mobile Care software will rear its head whenever someone with one of the aforementioned handsets dials up customer service; from there, an "intuitive, user-friendly" guide attempts to walk users through "issues such as diagnosing and repairing configuration problems as well as with making account and billing inquiries." T-Mobile asserts that trials of the service have shown that customers actually prefer this over a live human, which probably has everything to do with the wait times that invariably come with calling a fellow Earthling. Still, we can imagine quite a few smashed phones deriving from frustrations with this computerized service, at least one of which we hope to get captured on video for posting.[Via RCR Wireless News]
