Hasta La Gadget!

We joke that Gmail holds the record for the most drawn-out test phase, but Swype comes close: the keyboard replacement has been considered a work in progress on various platforms since before Android devices hit the streets, and well after it started shipping with phones. The developers at Nuance are a little braver as of today, as they’re launching Swype 1.5 for Android without any kind of beta label attached — they really, truly consider it done. Mind you, there won’t be a huge difference versus recent betas. The 1.5 update adds a quick shortcut to Dragon Mobile Assistant for those who have it installed, expands Living Language to 20 dialects, adds two new themes and refines both Smart Touch and Smart Reselect.

It’s where you can get Swype 1.5 that may be the biggest change. For the first time, Swype is launching as a straightforward Google Play download that should support the same easy installs and upgrades as most Android releases. Unfortunately, that also means a price tag for the store edition. Nuance is charging 99 cents on Google Play for a “limited time” before a price increase, so we’ll have to shell out if we want to take the easier path. The beta program remains intact, however — and when Swype is at least temporarily undercutting SwiftKey on pricing, we’d consider spending some cash.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile

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Source: Swype

Amazon isn’t shy about wanting to own as much of the Kindle Fire’s software experience as it can, which creates a challenge when implementing voice search — the company can’t just re-skin Google Now and call it a day. The next-quickest alternative is to buy a company wholesale, and TechCrunch has evidence that Amazon may have gone that route through a very stealthy acquisition of Evi, best known for its eponymous personal assistant app. While neither side has publicly commented on the deal, our colleagues have noticed that all of Evi’s directors and its company secretary have been replaced by staffers linked to Amazon UK. If it’s not an acquisition, there’s been at least some loss of autonomy. We don’t know exactly what Amazon would be doing should the acquisition prove real, although Evi’s Nuance-powered voice assistance for Android and iOS may be enough of a clue in itself — there’s only so many places Amazon can go with such a narrowly focused company.

Filed under: Tablets, Internet, Software, Amazon

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Source: TechCrunch

Panasonic and Nuance have been close partners on TV voice recognition in the past; we now know that they’re getting a bit cozier for Panasonic’s 2013 Smart TVs. The company’s newer LCDs and plasmas with voice recognition use Nuance’s Dragon TV for voice-only control of basics like volume as well as content and web searches. The engine will also speak out content and menus if you need more than just visual confirmation of where you’re going. Panasonic’s refreshed TV line is gradually rolling out over the spring, so those who see a plastic remote control as so very 2010 won’t have long to wait.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Via: SlashGear

Source: Panasonic

With the announcement of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 back in July, Nuance has released a big update for the “world’s best-selling speech recognition software.” NaturallySpeaking 12 now features seamless integration with a few new Microsoft products, including Windows 8, as well as Office 2013 and Internet Explorer 10.

Headlining the list of new features includes a 20% improvement to the accuracy of the voice recognition, as well as faster overall performance. NaturallySpeaking 12 includes some pretty neat features, like Smart Format Rules, that increases the accuracy of formatting sentences and structure based on the user’s input for punctuation and such.

Current users of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 will automatically get a free software update through a digital download notification, or can head to “Check for Updates” in the Help tab of the DragonBar. As for new customers, the update is ready for ordering, with more languages becoming available over the next couple of weeks.

Nuance’s products may not seems mainstream, but the company’s technology is used by Apple for their Siri voice recognition system, as well as the voice dictation feature in OS X Mountain Lion. If you don’t have either, NaturallySpeaking 12 is a good choice for dictation. You can even hook up your Android phone to use as a microphone over your home WiFi.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 updates with seamless Windows 8 support is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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It’s becoming increasingly clear that the next wave of mobile computing is going to be voice driven. Mobile assistants like Siri and Google Now are garnering plenty of media attention and earning legions of fans. Nuance, the company behind Dragon — often cited as the gold standard in voice recognition software — wants to make sure it doesn’t get left behind after pioneering the art of speaking to your computer. Dragon Mobile Assistant was the first step towards that goal, but it stuck primarily to searches and a few simple tasks. After leaving our stage here at CES, the company was nice enough to take us back to a suite where it demoed a project codenamed Wintermute. Besides throwing a bone to William Gibson fans, the project aims to make Nuance’s personal assistant truly personal and platform agnostic by building a profile of individual users in the cloud.

While clearly very much in the early stages, what we saw was none the less impressive. The mobile app, was able to easily recognize queries such as “what is the score of the Celtics game” and obey commands like “play music by the Rolling Stones.” Nuance even threw in a bit of snide, Siri-like personality — the assistant quipped about the rep being too young to listen to the Stones. That response was obviously triggered by the fact that the app knew Sean Brown, a senior manager at the company, was born well after the band’s hey day.

Continue reading Nuance Wintermute hands-on: a cross-platform, cloud-based personal assistant

Filed under: Software, HD, Mobile

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