Nuance, which provides world-class voice recognition technology behind Apple's Siri personal assistant, today announced its entrance into the fast-growing connected cars market.
Their new automotive platform combines Nuance's Dragon software and natural language understanding technologies to allow drivers to dictate messages, search for content, control music playback, navigation and more.
Was this an iCar solution Steve Jobs was dreaming about in his final days?
Digital secretary Siri was, and still is, the headline feature of the iPhone 4S. It owes some of its allure to the vast processing power of Apple's servers that run a remarkably sophisticated voice recognition software licensed from Nuance, a Burlington, Massachusetts-based provider of arguably the best voice technology money can buy.
According to Nuance’s marketing honcho, you can bet on Siri to improve over time. Upcoming developments in personal assistants will enable new stuff, such as more accurate voice recognition and personalization. So yeah, eventually you'll be able to ask Siri “Is my favourite movie on tonight?”
It seems Apple's introduction of Siri to the world of smartphones has had an unexpected affect – it has stopped the ongoing legal wrangle between two competing natural language software development companies. So much so that the pair are now in cahoots.
Both Nuance and Vlingo have been at each other's throats over perceived patent infringement, but the pair are now best buds after Nuance announced that it was to buy Vlingo, the same firm it took to court not that long ago.
The reason for the sudden turnaround? The pair seem to think that they need to join forces against a common enemy, namely, Apple...
Siri0us, the jailbreak tweak that allows iPhone 4, 3GS, and iPod touch owners to use Siri dictation, has been pulled from the Cydia store. We exclusively showed you Siri0us in action a couple of days ago, and many have started using the hack to use a Nuance-flavored version of Siri's dictation feature on older iDevices.
After the Siri0us servers experienced several outages due to high traffic over the last 48 hours, the developer, Eric Day, has removed Siri0us from Cydia. Eric is looking for a different voice recognition service that he can use legally in his tweak.
Jon Pielak is the former lead iPhone developer for Siri, the voice technology that Apple has implemented in the iPhone 4S. Pielak helped start the Siri project back in 2008.
Some may have forgotten that Siri actually started as a popular App Store app for the iPhone. In a recent blog post, Siri's former lead developer talks about why Apple bought Siri, what makes Siri special, the what's on the horizon for the most advanced consumer voice technology on earth...
Nuance has updated its Dragon Go! app in the App Store with a host of new features to enhance the voice dictation experience. In case you missed our original review, Dragon Go! allows you to speak commands like "Find movie tickets for tonight" and get results.
Dragon Go! was already pretty smart, but this recent update just made it way smarter. Nuance has added support for services like Spotify, Netflix and Wolfram|Alpha...
We know that there will be a new iPhone released next month. We know that Apple will probably hold its next announcement on October 4th, followed by availability the following week.
But what do we really know about the upcoming iPhone? 9to5Mac has published everything it has learned about the iPhone 5, including the one feature that will make you want to buy it...
At Apple's WWDC event back in June, Scott Forstall promised us that we would see a public release of iOS 5 "this Fall." And seeing as how Fall officially starts tomorrow, we can't be too far away from an announcement.
While we've got a pretty good idea of what to expect from the new software, there still are a couple of unknowns. For example, we know Apple is working on a secret voice-to-text feature, but we haven't seen it in action. Enter the new Target app...
Remember that Nuance speech-to-text feature that everyone's been so excited about ? A new photo sent to 9t05Mac by a claimed Apple employee appears to confirm its existence, and more importantly, that it's being tested right now as part of iOS 5.
While not yet active in the betas of iOS 5 that developers are getting to test in the wild right now, it is becoming clear that those inside Apple, and possibly those close to the company, have already been testing the feature for a while...
When it comes to iOS 5, Apple has some serious tricks up its sleeve. Though killer features like voice-to-text and Assistant weren't mentioned in Apple's WWDC keynote on the new firmware, they're there.
From what we know so far, the voice-to-text implementation is pretty straightforward. It appears to be system-wide and powered by Nuance technology. The Assistant feature on the other hand, has been a bit of a mystery. Until now...
In the weeks building up to this year's WWDC, there was a lot of speculation that Apple and Nuance were planning a major partnership to bring system-wide voice-to-text to iOS 5. The 2 companies were expected to make a big announcement at the Summer event.
But the developer's conference came and went with no mention of the new feature. Then we started to see code trickle in. Found deep inside Apple's new firmware, the evidence suggested that the company was still working on bringing voice-to-text to its customers this Fall.
Now we don't just have bits of code, we have actual proof. Hit the jump for the full screenshot...
Fresh from the release of iOS 5's fourth beta came news that there are references to unannounced voice recognition technology. When we wrote about this new development yesterday, speculation was that a Siri Assistant-like feature would be coming to iOS.
Now it seems there may be more to this 'talking to your iPhone' thing than we first thought, with 9to5Mac finding yet more code, this time pointing to integrated Nuance Dictation.
The code, discovered in the latest iOS 5 SDK, would bring Android-like text dictation to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. That is, if it makes its way into a final release of the OS...