In a keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Ford CEO Alan Mulally claimed that his company is modeling itself after the consumer electronics industry. As a result, he is positioning Ford SYNC and a packaging concept called “MyFord Touch” as platforms for delivering high-profile, popular, third-party services including Twitter (through an application called OpenBeak), Pandora and Stitcher.

Microsoft, Nuance Communications and BSquare take credit for SYNC and its support of multiple interfaces, applications and users. Indeed, the basic software platform was jointly developed by Microsoft and Ford using the Windows Auto platform. It was introduced in 2007 on selected vehicles with Nuance providing the speech processing engine to support “navigation” and command of a multiplicity of applications.

BSquare is a small Bellevue, WA-based is a highly-specialized system integrator with particular expertise in the Windows Auto environment. It built a custom user interface to Ford’s specification integrating Windows Auto with Adobe Flash and Nuance’s speech rec resources to control navigation, media, climate controls and phone functionality.

To its credit Ford has featured some of the most popular apps in the mobile Web milieu, including the two popular, personalized radio feeds: Pandora and Stitcher and audio rendering of microblogging phenom, Twitter. Rendering of Tweets is accomplished by using a mobile client OpenBeak (originally TwitterBerry) in conjunction with Nuance’s text-to-speech rendering capabilities. As for using speech to navigate services, Nuance has refined voice activation by offering “One-Shot Destination Entry”, enabling users to use a single utterance to both enter a full address and request navigation instructions. For instance, “Find the closest Italian restaurant” will generate local results, which become the basis for navigation when the driver says “take me there.” In addition, the Nuance-interpreted voice commands now control the SIRIUS Travel Link information portal, including near real-time sports scores, weather conditions, traffic, fuel prices, or movies listings.

As we noted here, Ford is finding success using mobile speech as a differentiater, with SYNC. It will expand on that success by incorporating voice command and navigation into a package called MyFord Touch, which will be launched on the model year 2011 Ford Edge (shipping in 2010) followed by global availability on the 2012 Focus. Under the name MyLincoln Touch, the package of services and resources will be “standard” on new Lincolns, starting with 2011 MKX (also available in 2010).

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