Nuance, the natural voice processing engine that powers voice recognition in Apple’s Siri digital assistant, recently announced the Drive! platform, basically the Siri for cars.
Today, the company announced another natural-language solution, one that lets you unlock your phone just by using your voice. Introducing Dragon ID, a brand new technology tapping your voiceprint to let the device know who you are by the sound of your voice.
Count us excited! We’re totally big on Nuance’s voice unlock possibly debuting on the next iPhone so we can all finally kiss cryptic passwords goodbye. Here’s a video of Nuance Dragon ID in action…
According to a press release, the Dragon ID taps voice biometrics technology to let vendors “secure and personalize access to phones, tablets, apps and PCs with a simple spoken word or phrase”.
And just how’s this supposed to work exactly?
For instance, just saying “Hello Dragon” can securely turn on a device and instantly launch a personalized home screen with favorite apps and content – even on shared devices like tablets or PCs.
Here’s your demo clip.
[tube]AOG3ExMxll4[/tube]
And if voiceprinting is good enough for banks, carriers and big business, I guess it should do the trick for smartphone users.
Dragon ID will initially support English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean for Android and “other platforms”, which nowadays is a popular way of referring to Apple without naming them.
Additional language packs will become available later this year.
We’re not sure if this technology will make its way into the next iPhone, but we’re definitely keeping our fingers crossed.
With Apple already in bed with Nuance, whose marketing chief hinted at possible Siri enhancements, and Apple’s boss Cook promising doubling down on Siri (“I think you’ll be really pleased with some of the things that you’ll see in the coming months”, Cook said at D10), anything and everything is possible.
Thoughts?