Now Nuance, however, plans to break down those barriers between its separate platforms, and focus on what it’s calling “intelligent systems.” The idea is to create a personal assistant that will persist beyond the interface, that can be accessed anywhere from the cloud, said Matt Revis, VP and GM of Nuance’s handset division. “We want to unify the personal assistance experience across form factors,” Revis told GigaOM.

As part of that intelligent systems effort, Nuance is trying to delve deeper into language in addition to broadening spoken language’s scope in a technology. Its NLU technology already understands context and idiom to a certain degree. But Revis said it is launching an initiative called Living Language that will allow its servers to dynamically update and speech databases to reflect changing language patterns as they occur.

“What you get is a very rapidly evolving language model, one that almost moves ahead of the zeitgeist,” Revis said. Living Language will get its first test not on Nuance’s voice platforms, but in its evolving predictive-text interface Swype. Nuance will use crowdsourcing to start analyzing new words Swype users type into their texts and emails. As new words and phrases begin trending, Swype will update its lexicon and make that new vocabulary available to its Swype apps.

Nuance launched the new crowdsourcing capabilities at CES 2013 on Monday, making them available in the latest version of the Swype Android beta (users will need to opt in to send data as well as receive dictionary updates). But Revis said the company plans to expand those capabilities to voice technologies. “We’re just starting with the keyboard,” Revis said.

As for the rest of Nuance’s intelligent systems work, Revis said we’ll have to wait to see specific products, but as the year goes on we should start seeing closer integration of its various consumer-facing and white-label voice command platforms: Dragon TV, Dragon Go, Dragon Drive, Dragon Dictation and Dragon Mobile Assistant.

The building blocks are already in place for that integration, Revis said. Most of Nuance’s products rely on a hybrid approach, using software on the device for simple voice commands, but reaching out into the cloud for more complex speech recognition features. The key will be moving the assistant itself into the cloud to sit alongside the enabling technology, knocking down the walls separating its now-distinct voice assistants.

A common voice for a common platform

Each interface will remain specialized to a certain degree. Your TV doesn’t need to understand the command “turn down the AC,” for example, but there will be a lot of crossover between platforms. For instance, we could use our TVs to update our social networks, and tell our phones to tell our TVs to record programs while we’re away.

Nuance also plans to do a lot of cosmetic work, creating unified themes for the app’s graphical user interfaces and a common set of voices and personalities for the assistants themselves. It’s imperative to create a common user experience to get consumers to embrace the idea of a universal voice assistant, Revis said.

Nuance will offer its universal assistant across its own Dragon products, but its primary business is licensing technology to hardware vendors – this will be no exception. Manufacturers like Apple, Samsung and LG sell across the consumer electronics landscape, making it possible for Nuance to bridge their TV and smartphone lines. Nuance also hopes to cross-license technology between vendors, so, for instance, a Samsung could partner with a Ford to ensure their TVs and cars use a common voice interface, Revis said.

As Nuance delves into more areas like the connected home and internet of things, there will be more opportunities to connect and interlink more devices. That’s where the potential of universal assistant could really get big. A talking washing machine or refrigerator might be useful, but a washing machine you could talk to through your smartphone would be even more useful.

Update: At CES, Nuance revealed two new customers for its Dragon Drive technology: Chrysler and ZTE. Chrysler will tap into Dragon Drive Messaging, speech recognition software that will allow driver to compose, send and listen to text messages using a voice interface. Chrysler is  implementing the service in its new Sprint-powered UConnect connected car platform, starting with the 2013 RAM 1500 and the 2013 STR Viper.

ZTE isn’t building a connected car platform so much as its developing a hands-free system. ZTE will begin embedding an app in its forthcoming Android phones called Car Mode, which allows users to control of variety of the phones functions — such as launching navigation apps, playing music and listening to dictated text messages — through simple voice prompts.

Update 2: The Next Web is reporting that Nuance has a code name for its cloud assistant, Project Wintermute.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock user brem stocker; Screaming image courtesy Flickr user Lazurite.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry

On Thursday, Nuance updated Mobile Assistant’s feature set. You can now play music by telling Dragon you want to listen to a particular artist or track in your song library. You can also open third-party apps with a voice command. Another small but highly useful enhancement is the ability to set an alarm with a simple spoken command.

The app is still technically in beta, but it’s downloadable in the Google Play store (U.S. only). Mobile Assistant was initially available only on smartphones with Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean (Android 4.0 and 4.1), but the new release will now work on older Gingerbread (Android 2.3) phones. No version is available on the iPhone yet, though it has promised an iOS version of the app. The move is a bit odd since Dragon would compete with Apple’s Siri, which is powered in part by Nuance technology.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

The patent is long, detailed and goes into a lot of depth about how Siri works and could work, including as a personalized recommendation service for online shopping, as a travel booking service, and as part of a car navigation system or the car’s entertainment system. Clearly Apple would want to cover its bases when it comes to Siri and its potential future uses. But it doesn’t mean Apple is currently working on any of this. Still, it’s always interesting to get a look at what a secretive company is at least pondering.

The patent also discusses all the different devices that could potentially be Siri-enabled. Writes Patently Apple:

Apple’s patent application lists a great number of devices beyond the iPhone that Siri may service in the future. They include, the iPod touch (a personal digital assistant), iMac (desktop computer), MacBook (laptop computer), iPad (tablet computer), consumer electronic devices, consumer entertainment devices; iPod (music player); camera; television; Apple TV (set-top box); electronic gaming unit; kiosk or the like.

The patent also discusses that the voice-assistant technology could be used in “any operating system such as, for example, iOS or Mac OSX.” Do we want Siri in everything? I’m not sure I want to talk to my computer or my camera. But I will reserve judgment until there is an actual product so I can see what a potential implementation of it would look like.

If you want the nitty-gritty of how Siri works, see the original post. For more about the awesome potential of voice-controlled devices, see Kevin Tofel’s GigaOM Pro report (subscription required) on the topic of “invisible interfaces.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

David Pogue of the New York Times  says Siri, Apple’s new voice-powered virtual assistant, is so good it has demoted the on-screen keyboard to “a glorified Plan B,” but he also reveals some interesting tidbits about how much it owes to voice recognition software company Nuance:

Apple won’t admit that it’s using a version of Dragon Dictation, the free iPhone app, but there doesn’t seem to be much doubt; it works and behaves identically. (For example, it occasionally seems to process your utterance but then types nothing at all, just as the Dragon app does.) This version is infinitely better, though, because it’s a built-in keyboard button, not a separate app.

Like Pogue and many other reviewers, Walt Mossberg of AllThingsD  focused on Siri in his appraisal. Mossberg’s reaction to Siri is generally more level-headed than Pogue’s, and in fact, early on he sums up his take on the 4S in general in very moderate tones:

Despite Siri, the iPhone 4S isn’t a dramatic game-changer like some previous iPhones. Some new features are catch-ups to competitors. I sense Apple chose to focus more on software and cloud service than on hardware. But, in my tests, the iPhone 4S performed very well. It’s a better iPhone for the same $199 entry price, at a time when some competitors are pricing their flagship smartphones starting at $299.

Macworld editor Jason Snell dives headlong into the issue of cellular signal attenuation, which was a problem with the iPhone 4′s design. He talks about the extensive media storm that surrounded, and then notes that Apple seems to have paid attention:

In all my tests, the old iPhone 4 “death grip” had no impact on the speed of cellular downloads on the iPhone 4S, nor did a reverse grip at the top of the phone. Only when I took both hands and performed a “death grip” that covered the entire phone (or at least touched all four corners of the phone simultaneously) did I see any signal attenuation.

Joshua Topolsky of This is My Next looks at the classic body design of the iPhone 4S (which is the same as the iPhone 4, unless you look very, very closely) and finds nothing wanting about it:

That said, the iPhone 4 design does stand the test of time (or 16 months in this case). Compared with most (if not all) of its Android  competition, this industrial design looms tall. Though enthusiasts might be bored of seeing the same hardware for more than a year, this still feels like the phone to beat in the looks department. The glass back — while incredibly prone to shattering on impact — feels as sleek and sexy as ever. The metal antenna and solid, machined buttons feel high-end, expensive even. If this were a car, it would be a Mercedes.

TechCrunch‘s MG Siegler notes that despite some disappointed reactions from onlookers, this is definitely “the best iPhone yet,” and starts off his review with a focus on the things that make that true. His first subject of praise is the new dual-core A5 processor:

Apps that used to take a longer time to perform a task — applying a filter in Camera+, for example — now work much faster. More generally, every app seems to load quite a bit faster. The best way to see this is to load the Settings app that is built into iOS. On the iPhone 4, it can take up to 3 seconds to load. On the iPhone 4S, it loads in less than a second. And the 4S is faster at switching between apps when multi-tasking.

Finally, Vincent Nguyen at SlashGear expresses some shutterbug love for the new iPhone 4S’s improved 8-megapixel rear camera. Discussing the improved sensor, as well as the refined aperture and new infrared filter, he says:

Does it all work? You bet it does. There are two noticeable improvements – quality and speed – and the best thing is that they’re clearly evident from the start. Sharpness and detail are significantly boosted in the iPhone 4S when compared to what the iPhone 4 can achieve; there’s less noise and less color bleed evident. Aberrations such as fringing around the edges of the frame are cut right back, a benefit of that five-lens array.

So is the iPhone 4S a hit? Judging by the tone of these reviews, I’d say it definitely is. Almost all start out talking about the unrealistic expectations that observers had for the iPhone 5 ahead of launch, and then go on to explain why those expectations don’t matter, and why Apple has managed to hit one out of the park yet again. Bottom line: No matter which phone you’re upgrading from, you’re sure to find something that makes you feel good about the decision.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• The future of notebooks: Following in the footsteps of the MacBook Air
• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”