At this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), amid new smartphones and tablets; connected TVs; automotive entertainment systems; and super-thin computers, speech processing providers were able to make the point that almost anything you can do with these new gadgets can be improved by adding voice to the user interface. Nuance Communications set the stage with with a series of announcements, including Dragon TV; Dragon Go! for Android-based mobile devices; voice control of UltraBooks(TM), the slim (think MacBook Air) laptops developed by the likes of ASUS, LG, Samsung and now Dell in conjunction with Intel; and for media access anywhere and everywhere, Nuance formed a 10-year alliance with GraceNote, Sony Corporations digital media management operation formerly known as the CDDB (for Compact Disk Data Base).

Dragon TV has an uncanny resemblance to Vlingo’s “Virtual Assistant for Smarter TV” described by TJ Leonard in this blog post. The post includes an embedded video demonstration that was first released in December 2011. TJ also notes that the acquisition of Vlingo by Nuance, which was announced in late December, is not likely to close until later in 2012. In the mean time, both Vlingo and Nuance will continue to promote their products. It’s all the more entertaining for CES attendees and all folks following the speech enabled electronics world.

Neither Nuance nor Vlingo are destined to be alone in their efforts to replace TV remotes with simple spoken instructions. As we noted in an earlier post, Microsoft has a number of initiatives around Kinect that are designed to bring all of the goodness enabled by xBox (games, streamed entertainment, Web navigation) under the control of a combination of voice and gestures.

Japanese Consumer Electronics giant Panasonic has a long-standing relationship with Novauris and will be reportedly rolling out voice controlled TVs later this year. The two companies reportedly co-developed embedded speech recognition software under the NovaLite brand for use by Panasonic directly, or under license to other TV and consumer electronic manufacturers.

Meanwhile, even in the absence of any efforts by Apple to provide tools or APIs for 3rd party developers, the Web is awash in demonstrations of “Siri hacks” designed to take control of household appliances and electronic devices. The video below (courtesy of Vimeo) is especially amusing because it shows the developer actually bolting a black box onto the back of a TV.

Siri Universal Remote from Todd Treece on Vimeo.

It doesn’t end with the TV and game console. As this article by Emma Woollacott in TG Daily points out, LG Electronics has packaged a whole suite of technology under its ThinQ brand to enable people to listen to spoken instructions and also provide verbal feedback, like when a washing machine is in need of a new bearing. It is by no means a new idea, either. This patent, issued to Panasonic (then called Matsushita) in 2006, describes a voice controlled “Home Agent Server” for taking command of household appliances. It references prior filings from Nokia, LG and ultimately AT&T, dating back to 2003.

So the pattern is in place. Embedded processors, high-speed wireless data links and server farms “in the cloud” are delivering on the long-promised vision of “Voice Control of Your Connected Life” in ways that are accurate and reliable and less subject to ridicule (although maintaining a sense of humor has been an important part of ongoing marketing efforts).

Categories: Articles

Tags: Nuance, automated speech processing, Consumer Electronics, Voice-Control