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OnStar announces MyLink smartphone apps, voice-based SMS, Facebook plans
Looks like OnStar users (and not just the Modest Mouse-lovin' yuppies in the commercial below) will soon get their beloved social networking where they need it least: behind the wheel. The slogan for the company's latest re-branding campaign is "responsible connectivity," meant to highlight the company's next-gen hardware, OnStar MyLink smart phone apps, and the Audio Facebook Updates feature we saw last month that, along with voice-based SMS, is being tested as we speak. MyLink, by far the most interesting of the lot, will let you start your car, hit the horn, control lights and door locks, and check your vehicle's diagnostics -- from your iPhone or Android handset. Now that we got all that out of the way, why don't you check out the newest commercial (and read some sweet, sweet PR) after the break?
OnStar expected to add Facebook updates and texting soon, might make some services free
Time waits for no infotainment system and GM's OnStar seems to be well aware of that fact. Plunging headfirst into the social world, the driver assistance service is said to be planning to start conveying Facebook status updates and text messages in an upcoming update, reputedly landing later this month. Text-to-speech translation will be done on incoming notes and voice-to-text is said to be undergoing testing for outgoing updates. So you can tell your friends you're free as a bird, born to run, rocking the highway, or whatever else, without ever having to speak to them directly or going to the effort of typing anything. The future sure is awesome. Oh, and it might not be all that expensive either, as we're also hearing that OnStar might make some services completely free to better compete with Ford's Sync. Original image courtesy of merriewells (Flickr)
Dragon for Email hits BlackBerry, turns your voice into a QWERTY keyboard
Okay, your voice isn't literally turning into a keyboard, but you know what we mean -- Dragon for Email is exactly what it sounds like, an app that brings Nuance's well-known speech-to-text technology to the BlackBerry platform with a special emphasis on composing emails. That's a perfect fit considering that email has remained BlackBerry's main raison d'être over the years, and it sounds delightfully unobtrusive considering that you merely need to press and hold your phone's side key while composing an email to kick off the dictation. Even better, it's free from App World for a limited time, so you might want to get in on that while the getting's good.
Encouraged by iPhone market, Nuance announces new medical apps
Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search from Nuance Communications were definite crowd-pleasers, so today the company is announcing specialized medical versions of the apps for physicians and medical professionals. The first app is Dragon Medical Mobile Dictation. It is designed to allow clinicians to dictate patient notes, emails and text messages instead of typing them on a mobile device. The idea is to let medical professionals dictate and capture information in real time with a smartphone, without having to return to a desktop or laptop computer. The product is expected to be available before the end of the year. Nuance is also announcing Dragon Medical Mobile Search, a variation of Dragon Search that will allow medical staff to search a variety of medical websites completely by voice using an iPhone. The app is expected to be released by April 30. Finally, Nuance is unveiling Dragon Medical Mobile Recorder, a voice capture app that will allow clinicians to conduct on-the-go dictation using a smartphone. Once the sound is recorded, the file is forwarded through Nuance's background speech recognition technology and into a transcription where a high quality draft is created, then returned for review and sign off. The Dragon Medical Recorder is due before the end of this year. Nuance estimates that by the end of next year, 81% of physicians will be using smartphones. More interesting is that the company research shows the iPhone breaking away from the pack of other smartphones to be the preferred device in the medical enterprise. According to the Nuance research, the Blackberry is still the leading smartphone among physicians, but the iPhone growth is explosive and almost doubled in use by physicians between 2008 and 2009. In a July survey of Medical Students it was found that 45% owned an iPhone or an iPod touch. Of those who did not own a smartphone, 60% planned to buy an iPhone or iPod touch within a year. That has to be good news for Apple, and I would expect Steve Jobs and colleagues to continue to push the iPhone into the enterprise in the coming months. For Nuance Communications, it's a further endorsement of Apple products. Earlier this month Nuance bought MacSpeech, the company that produces MacSpeech Dictate. The application uses the Dragon speech recognition engine. Nuance also provided the voice recognition that powers the popular Siri app for the iPhone, that lets users do searches with natural language queries. Peter Durlach, the Senior V.P. of marketing and Strategy for Nuance, told me the company is also taking a close look at the Apple iPad for use by medical professionals. The company will see if the form factor works for doctors and nurses, and Durlach says he expects the iPad to be an important part of future Nuance solutions.
Google's Nexus One censors your voice-to-text input, we #### you not
It'd be kinda funny if someone was live-bleeping your profanity, right? Sure, but five minutes later you'd sober up to regret and lingering annoyance. Turns out the Nexus One does it for real, courtesy of Google's speech-to-text engine -- it replaces notorious curses like the F and S words with a '####,' which is a more dramatic take on the Zune HD's now-obsolete Twitter censorship. As silly as this sounds, Google has come up with a good reason: We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent. Kudos for caring, but it wouldn't hurt to have an on / off option either -- after all, it's not like we're asking for pinch-to-zoom here, and we'll promise to use a swear jar.
Google Voice can now manage your cellphone's voicemail (video)
You read that headline correctly, Google Voice now works with your existing mobile phone number -- no need to choose a new Google number that must be communicated to friends, family, and co-workers. This "lighter" version of Google Voice then lets you hand-over voicemail responsibility (and your data) to Google's authority where you can listen to (or read via automatic voice to text conversion) your voicemail on a computer in any order you like, read them as text messages on your phone, and choose personalized greetings by caller. A side-by-side feature table that compares Google Voice when choosing a Google number versus your existing cellphone number can be found after the break. We've also dropped in a cutsie video overview of the change -- surely a company that produced it can't be evil, can it?
Speech-to-whimsically-colored-text
Nintendo, attempting to maintain their family-oriented image, has taken great caution to avoid standard voice chat in their online offerings...at least between people not firmly established as friends. Services such as Xbox Live might embrace the liberal cursing of prepubescent punks, but in a purely audio-based communciation system, it's almost impossible for a system to filter out profanity in real-time. According to my mother's sister's friend's uncle an IGN Insider forum poster (who has some street cred, thanks to a previous accurate analysis of the internal Wiimote speaker) and a recent patent, Nintendo will be implementing a speech-to-text program to avoid such problems. In addition to standard word recognition, the program will also register the tone and volume of your voice to change the text into various sizes and colors. "STFU n00b" will be in red, presumably. By converting audio data to simple text, the Wii will very easily be able to filter and/or change any words that are flagged in the system. Hopefully, the system will allow parents and users to modify the filters, and perhaps just give an optional regular voice-to-voice setting as well. [via Joystiq]
