Nuance is making it easier for mobile application developers to add voice input and output to personal navigation applications by offering Vocon Navigation as a pre-packaged “App Module” to support “one-shot destination entry.” Vocon is Nuance’s long-standing line of embedded speech processing technology. It has been successfully integrated into the “One-Shot Destination Entry” offerings integrated into the PNDs and navigation applications in models marketed by Audi, BMW, Ford and Mercedes-Benz. The Vocon Navigation App Module is designed to leverage the creative energy of a broader community of mobile application developers by packaging the core software with grammars, text-to-speech capabilities, dialog flow and links to the graphical user interface.

Several languages and dialects are supported, as are frameworks and software to support mobile, multi-modal interactions. You can keep up to date by referring to this descriptive page on the Nuance Web site.

It is becoming increasingly evident that we are well into an era that takes us “Beyond the SDK” in the mobile world. While this offering does not fall into the category of a speech API, it does overlap with many of the initiatives that mobile API providers have launched to fire up the creative juices of the app developer community. As the makers of “tools,” “reusable code,” and “development environments well know, developers gravitate toward the well-understood, well-documented and familiar. Spoken input and output from mobile navigation devices and apps conform to those three criteria.

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Tags: mobile speech, mobile applications, Nuance Communications, Recombinant Communications, navigation, automotive