Gaining and maintaining mindshare among developers is an ongoing challenge for members of the mobile application ecosystem. That’s why Nuance Communications has launched a new way to access its Dragon Mobile SDK for Apple’s iOS and Android operating systems. It is a self-service website tightly linked to the Web site of the Nuance Mobile Developer Program (abbreviated as NMDP, but represented in graphic form as NDEV).

As Greg Sterling notes in this post on Internet2Go, Google’s Speech team has done an effective job of speech-enabling every text-box that appears on an Android-based smartphone or tablet. I made a similar observation about Google’s “home field advantage” back in September 2010 here. In the interest of providing consistent experience across devices and platforms, it is good to see Nuance making it easier for developers to gain access to and experience not just with the Dragon Mobile SDK (which includes “easy-to-integrate prepackaged wrappers and widgets” to speed up the process of adding voice to their apps), but also with access to a community of peers through an on-line forum.

The self-service portal also provides full documentation of the Dragon SDK along with the code samples that many developers have told me are crucial to help spark new ideas. The SDK’s automated speech recognition (ASR) resources support US and UK English, European Spanish, European French, German, Italian and Japanese, promising “even more” in 2011. Text-to-speech (TTS) rendering is supports “more than 35 languages.”

Meanwhile, Nuance continues to offer its own branded version Dragon applications for BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 “and others,” in addition to iOS and Android.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Nuance, Dragon, mobile speech, Recombinant Communications, Developer Support