Voice technology is the wave of the future, and behind that Wave is Nuance. They are behind nearly every implementation of voice recognition of which you are aware. They’re everywhere; from the voice systems at AT&T and Vonage, to MacSpeech, GPS units, in-car units, and so much more. I sat down with a few of the guys at Nuance to have a little chat.
Basically, they gave me the lowdown on how all of this voice technology relates to Apple products. You might already know of their Dragon apps on the iPhone. Their dictation app allows you to jot a quick note and copy it or send it as a text or e-mail. Then there’s their search app. Not only will it search with your voice, but it even has a killer carousel interface for choosing your search service. And remarkably, they’re both free, and will be for some time. I’m sure at some point they’ll get sick of just giving it away.
But that’s not all. Nuance is behind some of the most used voice systems known. They provide the tech for Ford’s Sync and other similar automobile systems, including Mercedes, GM and BMW. BMW’s system even has a newer way of inputting your destination. You don’t have to answer prompts like “Street?” or “City?” you can just speak the entire thing. You probably won’t be surprised to hear they also provide speech technology for nearly all of the major GPS navigation companies for both speech recognition and text to speech. Oh yes, they also do something involving voice control, but I shouldn’t say much more about that.
So, what’s all this leading to? Speech technology is one of those things that makes you feel like you’re in the future. Perhaps someday we won’t even have to know how to type quickly because the computers might just listen to what we say. Dare I say they’ll likely even know what we’re thinking? Crazy. Sadly, we aren’t there yet, but Nuance is constantly improving their technology.
You can look for this technology to be coming in iPhone apps during the year. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of additional voice features for TomTom, Magellan or even Navigon’s iPhone apps. In the meantime, just keep using the Dragon Apps, as they are a steel at the low, low price of free. Future upgrades don’t look to be getting more features just yet, but Nuance is determined to keep tweaking and improving their recognition engine, which—if you didn’t know—actually gets better the more you use it. You might not have known this, since it doesn’t require you to create a profile, ever.
Download [Dragon Dictation]
Download [Dragon Search]
I agree that Nuance is doing a remarkable job of creating very useful speech recognition application. However, the performance of speech recognition systems is still not comparable to humans.