As the year winds down, here’s a look back at the biggest, most significant things that happened in the apps we use on our smartphones and tablets this year, as well as the most important themes to watch out for come 2012. Read More »
Tech
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 »
Vlingo, a voice recognition start-up, isn’t sweating the introduction of Apple’s Siri voice action and AI system. In fact, the start-up saw its best week last week with five consecutive days of record usage with voice actions up 50 percent daily over the previous high. Read More »
So will Apple’s Siri be like Facetime, widely praised and less widely used? Or will it be like touch screens that ushered in new ways of interacting with handsets? Folks in the speech recognition and virtual assistant market are hoping it’s the latter. Read More »
In a crowded market for speech recognition, Vlingo will focus on becoming a personal assistant, signaling an evolution from voice as a user interface and a means to avoid cramped keyboards, to voice as a natural means of getting a computer to do what you want. Read More »
Vlingo today added voice support to Foursquare on Android handsets, allowing Foursquare users to check in, find friends and send shouts through speech-to-text. Vlingo users can also update their social status in both Facebook and Twitter by using the Vlingo widget and speaking their update. 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 »
When it comes to designing intuitive, compelling user interfaces, Apple is hands-down the best. Starting with the Mac but most evident with each new generation of “i” products — iMac, iPod and iPhone — the company has demonstrated time and again what so many other… Read More »
Nuance Communications said today it’s offering an upgrade to its line of speech recognition software aimed at carriers and handset makers. The new software includes a combination of on-handset speech recognition and server-based transcription that means it can do far more than navigate an address… Read More »
Nuance Communications said today it’s bought several patents related to IBM’s speech recognition technology, joining Microsoft as one of the two the largest licensors of such technology. IBM, Nuance and Microsoft all provide speech-to-text and voice recognition products, an industry that’s growing in importance as… Read More »
Vlingo’s new software for BlackBerrys (the link goes live at 5 a.m. PT), which gives me the ability to navigate my phone entirely by voice, has me feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. I press a button on my Pearl, wait for a chime,… Read More »
More Must Reads
