Amazon already uses IVONA technology on the Kindle Fire, using the software to, for example, read user actions aloud or help navigate the touchscreen. Amazon might now integrate some of these features into its e-readers. (The Kindle Paperwhite lacks the experimental text-to-speech feature that was available on the older Kindle Touch.)

Over the past few years, various advocacy organizations for blind people — most prominently, the National Federation for the Blind — have sued or protested against Amazon’s attempts to sign deals with school districts and universities to bring Kindle devices into classrooms. The organizations argue that Kindle e-readers and ebooks are inaccessible to blind students and are thus prohibited from use in public schools by federal law. More recently, advocacy by the National Federation for the Blind might have helped scuttle a multi-million dollar deal between Amazon and the U.S. State Department that would have provided Kindles to overseas learning programs. If Amazon is able to integrate text-to-speech technology into more of its devices, the company might be able to avoid some legal hassles.

Of course, IVONA’s technology could also help Amazon create a competitor to Apple’s Siri voice-recognition technology. (Rumors that Amazon is working on a smartphone have been making their way around the internet for awhile.) It seems more likely, though, that the primary driver of this acquisition is Amazon’s desire to avoid future lawsuits — and to get Kindles into more hands worldwide.

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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.

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SoundHound, the company that makes voice recognition apps for music and song search, released user figures for the first time on Tuesday — and the numbers are pretty impressive. The company now has 50 million users worldwide on iOS and Android; its service is processing more than 4 million music searches per day, and receiving 1,000 hits per second. SoundHound’s growth has been speeding up significantly of late: The new metrics in 2011 represent a tenfold increase in usage since 2010, the company says.

Not an overnight success

To be sure, SoundHound has been building toward this for some time. The company began in 2005, as founder Keyvan Mohajer was studying for his Ph.D. at Stanford and dedicating his studies to voice recognition technology. SoundHound has raised $16 million to date and as of this past summer had around 55 employees.

The company’s flagship SoundHound app identifies songs that a user sings or hums; its newer app, Hound, debuted in May and can identify when a user says the name of an artist, album or song. More recently, SoundHound has debuted integrations with iOS 5 and iCloud and announced a partnership with the popular on-demand music streaming service Spotify.

Competing against the big dogs

But will the increasing interest in voice recognition technology by larger companies such as Apple ultimately render SoundHound moot? It could, but it’s not a certainty by any means: SoundHound owns all the technology that powers its apps, and Mohajer’s name is on three patents pertaining to voice recognition, so the company is unlikely be copied without a fight.

It’s more likely that SoundHound will emerge as an acquisition target for a larger company keen to get into the space. That’s probably one of the reasons SoundHound’s investors, which include the first investor in Pandora, Larry Marcus, have backed the company. It’s been a long road for SoundHound, but it will be interesting to see what’s ahead for the company now that its technology has headed toward the mainstream.

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SoundHound’s Founder and CEO Keyvan Mohajer launched three profitable companies before he graduated from college. After completing his undergraduate work at the University of Toronto in 2000, Mohajer did some soul-searching to think about what to do next. “I realized that though I’m an entrepreneur and I like to start things, I’m also really passionate about technology. Some of my earlier companies were very successful, but they weren’t exactly high-tech,” he told me in a recent interview. “So I decided to get my Ph.D. in a deeper technology field and apply what I learned to start a really high-tech company.”

When Mohajer decided to go high-tech, he went big. He enrolled in Stanford’s graduate electrical engineering department, where he very quickly found his next big opportunity. “I realized that we are going to one day talk to our computers,” he said. “That day is going to come, and it’s going to come within my lifetime.” Mohajer dedicated his doctoral studies to voice recognition technology, and founded SoundHound two years before he received his Ph.D. in 2007.

Currently, SoundHound’s specialty is delivering information about music. Users can sing or hum a tune into its SoundHound app and the app returns the song name, as well as other information. Last week, the company released its Hound app, which can identify when a user says the name of an artist or album.

The slightly frivolous-seeming “name that tune” aspects of SoundHound’s applications belie the seriousness of the technology and business underneath it all. SoundHound has raised $16 million in venture capital and currently has 55 full-time employees. Investors have been attracted to the company by the future potential of SoundHound’s core technology, Mohajer told me. “We own all of our technology, while a lot of other apps in this space license their core technology,” he said. “We built everything in-house and we own all of our intellectual property.

I asked Mohajer if SoundHound’s proprietary technology and team of razor-sharp Ph.D.s has attracted interest from larger companies like Apple, who could incorporate voice search into its iTunes operations, or Internet radio website Pandora. The CEO demurred from talking about his company’s specific exit options, but pointed out that SoundHound’s board of directors includes Larry Marcus, who was the first investor in Pandora and currently sits on Pandora’s board. He also implied that in the right hands, the company’s technology could be employed for a much wider variety of uses. “We’re only in the music vertical now… but we argue that there’s a big demand for the future of computation devices that rely on voice recognition,” he said. “I’ve learned that it’s very important not to think about an exit and an outcome, and to just find something that you really enjoy doing.”

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Apple may be positioned to change all that, though, with the iOS 5 platform it will outline at next week’s WWDC in San Francisco. The company has reportedly been in discussions to license Nuance’s effective voice technology – dubbed Dragon – and may integrate it with the new version of iOS 5. Apple could make the technology available to developers as a built-in API in iOS 5, handing app creators a valuable new tool. Such a move would not only give voice recognition a much-needed push into the mobile mainstream, it would give Apple the chance to once again transform the way we interact with our phones. Here’s why:

1) Voice recognition technology is finally ready for prime time. Dragon powers Nuance’s FlexT9  for Android, a dictation app that sells for a mere $5 and enjoys a four-star user rating after more than 1,100 reviews. And there is no shortage of compelling use cases, from accessing a navigation app while driving (when your hands should be on the wheel) to dictating lengthy messages rather than typing on a miniature keyboard.

2) Apple knows how to educate the consumer. Voice recognition has come a long way, but using it still isn’t always intuitive. Google’s technology, for example, requires users to say the words “period” or “comma” if they want to add punctuation to their messages. But Apple’s marketing genius lies in showing consumers how to use technology: The first iPhone commercials were essentially tutorials in how to surf the Web, access email and find nearby businesses on the handset. A similar campaign could illustrate how to do all those things and more by talking, not typing.

3) Apple is a master of the user interface. The touchscreen was nothing new when the iPhone came to market; Apple’s true innovation was in simplifying the technology with an interface that made it easy for users to navigate their phones. The company could do the same with voice by integrating Dragon closely with iOS, making it easy to send messages or navigate the Safari browser by speaking. And the legions of iOS developers will surely find innovative new ways to leverage voice in everything from messaging to gaming to social networking.

For more thoughts on how Apple could leverage voice recognition technology to change the way we use our phones, see my latest Weekly Update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Image courtesy Flickr user Lazurite.

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The project combines Google’s speech-recognition technology with its automated system for translating text on computers, which now covers 52 languages. The company showcased the technology as a “concept demo” two months ago and now hopes to have a basic mobile translation system in place “within a couple of years,” according to the Times story. (A Google spokesman declined to tell me whether the project has moved beyond the concept stage and said the company has no news to announce.)

Delivering accurate translations in near real time will be an extremely difficult task, however. The language information behind such a service couldn’t possibly be stored and accessed on a phone, so Google will need the fast access to the cloud promised by HSPA and LTE. (Current speech-to-text engines send large chunks of data to the cloud for conversion to text, but translations during voice conversations will have to be infinitely faster.) And while Google’s speech recognition software is respectable, the company may need to bulk up its portfolio by acquiring another player on the field — Nuance, which has continued to expand its portfolio with the recent acquisitions of SpinVox and Jott , would be a particularly attractive (if expensive) option.

The value of technology that can deliver on-the-fly translations is evident in the Phraselator, a pricey gadget used by soldiers in Iraq. But to be effective in the mass market, voice recognition technologies must be able to consistently understand users regardless of speech patterns, dialects and other variables. Meanwhile, software must be able to determine context and other nuances to accurately translate one language to another. That’s difficult enough for humans to do; it may not be possible with technology alone.

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Image courtesy Flickr user Jeremy Brooks.

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