At CTIA 2008 SF, here are my notes from my meeting with Michael Wehrs, VP Evangelism and Industry Affairs at Nuance Communications. Nuance Communications, Inc. offers speech-based solutions for businesses and consumers worldwide. Nuance Communications mobile solutions have applications in various products offered by mobile device and automotive manufacturers. Nuance’s mobile group has experienced the largest growth and recently reported over $200M in revenue. Last year, their embedded device technology was installed in over 200M devices.
Michael had a bunch of demonstrations to show off the Nuance technology in action. Some of the fundamental technology involves an embedded client with a connection to a server for speech recognition and analysis, conversion into a text string, then using a search engine to retrieve results. Because this was a briefing, quite a few of these demos were optimized to save time and show off the use cases, but overall, they show good results.
While the meeting was brief, here are some takeaways:
- Nuance generally will do some custom integration between the handset and mobile operator to delivery a custom experience
- The Nuance system knows about the device from which the speech request was sent. An attempt to optimize the results sent back to the subscriber for the best results and least amount of clicks.
- Most often Nuance tries to exploit their technology against the on deck portal and other services.
- The user cannot customize how the result set will be returned based on a voice query using the embedded client.
While the applications have commonly been used for Navigation or Search, there are a few other applications services such as Dictation (speech to text SMS) which can be implemented on more devices. Having used a quite a few Verizon device which have the speech navigation technology, Nuance is starting to deliver on the promise to speech commanded devices. Hopefully it will get to the point where the speech search will yield quick results.
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