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With the popularity of Siri on the iPhone 4S and rumors of a voice-controlled Apple television set, voice recognition and control have leapt to the forefront of the technology industry as companies seek to revolutionize the way users interact with their devices. Nuance Communications has long been a leader in the the field of voice recognition, and quietly provides that back-end functionality for Siri and other Apple products.
Rumors of an Apple television set have centered around Siri voice control, fueled in no small part by Steve Jobs' comments to biographer Walter Isaacson regarding his idea for a television set interface being "the simplest user interface you could imagine". In seeking to open up some of that vision to a broad array of television manufacturers, Nuance today announced the launch of Dragon TV, a natural language recognition platform specifically tailored for the television experience.
Leveraging Nuance’s voice and natural language understanding capabilities, Dragon TV creates the “lean-back experience” consumers demand, with the ability to easily find content by speaking channel numbers, station names, show and movie names. People can even search for content by actor and genre, and stay connected via Twitter, Facebook and Skype.
Nuance's list of commands understood by the platform also include requests for guide/schedule information and DVR playback control.
In addition to Nuance's push into television, the company today also announced the launch of a partnership with Intel to bring voice recognition technologies to the chipmaker's new "Ultrabook" platform for ultra-light notebook computers. While Nuance already offers a number of voice-related applications for PCs, the new partnership will reportedly deliver greater integration of the functionality for core system features.
Nuance’s Dragon voice recognition technology, which is at the core of the renowned Dragon NaturallySpeaking software used by millions, will be deeply integrated into the new Intel application. Using this new capability, consumers will be able to control their Ultrabook just by using their voice. Consumers will be able to quickly and easily launch applications, play media, interact with social media sites and control their email and calendars with natural voice commands.
Additional details on the Ultrabook integration will be available later this year.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)This is a great example of how technology companies fail to "get it". Does anyone really imagine Apple's TV/Siri integration will in any way involve "speaking channel numbers"?
The continued existence of concepts like channel numbers are what's wrong with TV, not the fact that you have to use your fingers to input them.
Surely now is the time for Apple to use its war chest and acquire Nuance? It's a piddly $8bn or so. Loose change for Apple
Sorry to call out you specifically - but this is a pet peeve of mine on here. This seems to be the "go to answer" for posters. Really? Any time Apple runs into a company that competes or has something Apple might want/need/is developing they should just buy the company. I'm glad you're not running Apple.
And on the flip side - not every company is for sale. Some companies actually enjoy being - you know - their own company.
As usual, Apple leads others follow ...
What did they lead in this arena?
It's a brand new thing.
And once Apple does something, the Apple tech sites then begin reporting on what the other guys are doing with similar technology. Doesn't matter than it was being used beforehand. That wasn't important. It's only important now that it's in direct competition with Apple.
So to people like LTD, it looks like they're copying Apple. And thus, he'll go on and on about how Apple did X first, and now it's safe for the rest to follow, post up consumer satisfaction reports, and...well...you know the spiel.
Thing is, that's the way LTD and the rest seem to prefer things to be. It doesn't matter than their opinion is borne of ignorance. It only matters that they have something good to say about their favorite company.
It's....kinda weird. But it gets the internet juices flowing, so on it goes.
100% correct.
Had Apple not done what they did with Siri, we wouldn't be reading this news.
So you think that they just started development on this since Siri was released?
Nuance is just a tool Apple uses as an interface to Siri. Siri has as much to do with voice recognition as IBM's Watson does.
"Just a tool".... it's the heart of the tool.Without it there is no Siri.
Siri doesn't do any voice recognition... the Nuance speech engine does.
Siri is the interface to that engine and performs an action based on the output from the speech engine.
And Apple didn't create Siri, they bought it and gave it a visual facelift.