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Nuance adds Rovi's metadata to Dragon TV, becomes annoyingly good at TV trivia

Nuance, of Dragon TV fame announced today that it was licensing Rovi's (formerly known as Macrovision) metadata for its talky-TV platform. Once integrated, the application will be able to marshall far more information than it currently can -- enabling it to give answers to queries like "Who plays Chuck on Gossip Girl?" That said, we're not holding out much hope that it'll be able to answer our question about which guy from CSI played that bad guy in that movie we can't remember the title of, or something.

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Rovi and Nuance to Advance Voice Activated Guidance and Content Discovery

Companies Collaborating to Design Apps and Services for Cable Set-Tops, TVs and other Entertainment Devices

BOSTON, Mass. (THE CABLE SHOW – Booth: 1133), MAY 21, 2012 – Rovi Corporation (NASDAQ: ROVI) and Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced that the two companies are collaborating to further accelerate voice activated discovery and guidance applications for cable service providers and consumer electronics manufacturers. Nuance has licensed and will be integrating Rovi's rich entertainment data with Dragon TV to provide TV manufacturers and cable service providers the ability to access the wide variety of Rovi-indexed content for TV shows, movies and cast and crew details just by speaking. Dragon TV is Nuance's voice and language understanding platform for set-top boxes and connected TV devices.

Nuance and Rovi are also developing a new application that marries Dragon TV with Rovi's innovative guide technology. The result is the ability to simply speak to change the channel, and browse, bookmark and search for content on both live and On Demand TV programming. For instance, people can say, "Find comedies with Adam Sandler"; "Show me information on 'The Big Bang Theory,'" and even "Who plays Chuck on Gossip Girl?" By incorporating Rovi's broad content and information data in its language models, Dragon TV offers the industry's most compelling, expansive and ready-to-deploy TV voice platform.

A demonstration of the application will be showcased during The Cable Show 2012 at Rovi's Booth # 1133.

"Consumers love that today's cable services and program guides offer so many options for shows, movies, content, information widgets and more. But without an easy way to access and discover that content, today's digital living room experience is lost," said Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile. "By integrating Rovi's data as part of our Dragon TV platform, people will ultimately be able to lean back and speak to instantly find and discover the shows and content they want."

"Entertainment options will continue to grow. With it will be the complexity of finding and deciding what to watch. Consumers want easy to use and simple ways for discovering entertainment that doesn't require a remote control with as many keys as a keyboard. Voice brings this capability," said Corey Ferengul, EVP of Product Management and Strategy at Rovi Corporation. "Our relationship with Nuance further expands our ability to provide our customers - service provider and consumer electronics manufacturers - with an advanced media guide that redefines consumers' discovery and TV viewing experience."