Microsoft’s new Xbox One is listening to every word uttered in your living room. But it’s only interested in very few of them . Read more »
Nuance powers speech interfaces in phones, TVs, cars and websites. Now its creating advertising that will both listen to your questions and respond to them. Read more »
A new startup backed Turntable’s Seth Goldstein plans to make connected software without the car. Joyride is building a gaming and entertainment suite for the smartphone designed to be entirely hands-free. Read more »
IBM’s latest “5 in 5″ list picks technologies the IT giant feels will hit the mainstream in the next 5 years. Its 2012 choices all center on richer data input and output that give computers the ability to taste, smell, touch, and feel. Read more »
New “deep neural networks” technology out of Microsoft and the University of Toronto claims to not only translate your English into Mandarin but to speak it in your voice. Microsoft head researcher Richard Rashid demonstrated the technology in China recently. Read more »
A new research paper from Google highlights the importance of big data in creating consumer-friendly services such as voice search on smartphones. More data helps train smarter models, which can then better predict what someone say next — letting you keep your eyes on the road. Read more »
Developers are getting another Siri-like tool to embed speech-enabled virtual assistants in their apps. Lexee, a new product from interactive voice response provider Angel, offers an SDK for iOS and Android users. Lexee has a point and click system for building conversation flows and user analytics. Read more »
T-Mobile is giving its rather pathetic MyTouch voice-command feature a much-needed overhaul. It’s incorporating the same semantic-search technology Nuance uses in Dragon Go into Genius, allowing the voice assistant to search over 200 different content providers and understand intent rather than just words. Read more »
Google has opened its Knowledge Graph to the English-speaking world and has made intelligent voice search possible on mobile phones. Underneath it all, of course, are ever more-complex methods of analyzing data to make search smarter and easier than it has any business being. Read more »
Apple’s Siri voice commands for iPhone have made it the target of a patent lawsuit from a university in Taiwan. The school’s lawyers say they are also looking into whether to target similar technology from Microsoft and Google next. Read more »
Sure, using voice commands to turn on the car radio on your iPhone is nifty, but iSpeech wants to elevate speech-recognition technology beyond the device and distribute it throughout our homes. Tony Stark can talk to his house in Iron Man, so why can’t you? Read more »
Swype just got a whole lot smarter. Nuance is updating Swype with the same sophisticated contextual-anguage technologies it uses in its speech-recognition products. The result is what Nuance is calling a “living keyboard” — one that can learn both its user’s vocabulary and his habits. Read more »
A lot of automakers are lining up to support Apple’s new Siri Eyes Free technology, but Ford, the most aggressive company in the connected-car space, isn’t joining the queue. A platform war over the connected-car interface might be in the making. Read more »
The adoption of tablets, social media and new interfaces and the changing nature of the TV itself mean the digital living room will continue on its path of rapid change, thanks to new ways of creating, viewing, bundling, distributing and selling content. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Should the industry take “Project Glass” seriously? Does Google have a truly disruptive user interface technology in its labs? Project Glass aligns with critical UI factors, and it plays to Google’s strengths in user interface and its data, mapping and communications expertise, so don’t dismiss it ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
There are a lot of bad Siri imitators in the Android Market, but Monday night a pretty close approximation to Apple’s now-iconic personal assistant will be available. Nuance Communications is launching an Android version of Dragon Go, it’s voice-powered semantic search app. Read more »
In half a dozen years, I’ve tried more task manager apps than smartphones — and I’ve tried dozens of phones. But Any.DO, a free app for Android, offers an elegant iOS-like interface and syncs with Google Tasks. If you do one last thing this year, try Any.DO. Read more »
Nuance and voice recognition rival Vlingo have put away their knives and are now set to become one company with the announcement today that Nuance was buying its competitor. The two companies are set to take on the exploding opportunity in providing natural language interfaces. Read more »
New hardware helped Apple sell 4 million iPhone 4S handsets over the weekend, but Siri, the personal assistant software, may be the most groundbreaking aspect. Here’s a closer look at the difference in voice command and intelligence between the two largest mobile platforms: iOS and Android. Read more »
Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform is set to improve with Mango, a software update coming soon. I’ve spent some time with Mango on my smartphone, and it didn’t take long to impress me. Microsoft has a tough road ahead due to competition, but Mango will help. Read more »
Microsoft is looking at speech technology in the Mango update of WP7 to help the platform get back into the smartphone game. But with Apple also positioned to announce Nuance technology in iOS 5, it shows that speech is becoming table stakes in the smartphone wars. Read more »
Speech technology is poised to be a game-changer for smartphones, especially as they get embedded into operating systems and hardware. Nuance CTO Vlad Sejnoha said speech is transforming from an alternative to text input into a powerful tool that can connect users more quickly to information. Read more »
Sensory’s TrulyHandsfree Voice Control 2.0 software recognizes and responds to dozens of keywords and phrases and lets people perform actions without the need for a button press. It enables a much more natural interface with a device that can be listening for an array of triggers. Read more »
Rumor has it Apple is in talks with Nuance to strike a deal allowing Apple to use Nuance’s speech recognition software. One of the uses mentioned was the possibility of using the software in the new NC data center, but I don’t think it’s likely that the […] Read more »
Nuance is making a big play to be the main speech technology behind mobile apps. The company has launched the Nuance Mobile Developer Program that gives iOS and Android developers access to the Nuance Mobile SDK to integrate the Dragon Mobile speech platform into their apps. Read more »
Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) may be coming with new capabilities, but Froyo (Android 2.2) already has a feature that’s under-utilized by most users. Google has included sophisticated voice input technology in Froyo that can turn handling an Android phone into a largely hands-free experience Read more »
Apple iPhone users are still waiting for an official Google Voice app, but they don’t have to wait for transcribed voicemails because Yap does that today. The free application makes it easy to read voicemails and respond to them by return call, email or text message. Read more »
AdelaVoice, a startup founded in January of this year, has just launched a compelling Android application called StartTalking that addresses the texting while driving issue. The software creates outgoing and reads incoming texts solely through voice commands, without needing to touch or look at your smartphone. Read more »
Vlingo this morning introduced a feature that reads messages for drivers, eliminating the need to take their hands off the wheel. It’s the latest interesting offering from the startup, which is effectively competing in the speech-recognition space against giants like Google, Microsoft and Nuance. Read more »
Microsoft today said it has tapped Yap to power its voice-to-text application for BlackBerry users on Sprint’s network. The move is something of a coming-out for the North Carolina startup, which has joined a crowded field of speech recognition software vendors. Read more »
