Nuance Communications has released its “Next Generation Dragon Drive” integrating the fruits of its acquisition of Tweddle Connect with its broadly deployed line of Dragon-branded automotive offerings. As a result, drivers have new alternatives when it comes to taking advantage of speech-enabled services in cars. In addition to the mainstays of phone control, messaging, navigation and control of the audio entertainment supported by the car’s dashboard mounted “head unit,” drivers or passengers will be able to avail themselves of “fully customizable content and app delivery services.” In other words, if they want to access their accounts on Pandora and listen to their personalized playlists, they won’t be restricted to the services supported by the auto manufacturers’ exclusive deals with Sirius Radio, Rhapsody or other streaming content providers.

Dragon Drive’s secret sauce is a new “hybrid” architecture. In addition to Dragon Speech — which is an automobile-hardened, natural-language speech recognition resource — Nuance is introducing two new components. First is Dragon Link which is a communication management component that coordinates interactions between an app running on an individual’s smartphone and resources running on the car’s head unit. It takes care of authenticating the driver and and employing his or her user profile information for apps and services once they enter the car. But the real master of ceremonies is called Dragon Drive Connect; it is the result of the Tweddle acquisition and serves as a content delivery and user management service.

Dragon Drive Connect integrates or delivers content and applications that have been optimized for in-car use. Its line-up already includes social network leaders like Facebook and Twitter. It also includes services from Yelp, Infogroup, Slacker Radio, TuneIn Radio, Deezer, Rdio, AccuWeather, OPIS/ Gas Buddy, Xignite, STATS, INRIX, TomTom, West World Media’s Cinema-Source, MovieTickets.com, Reuters and others.

As vice president and general manager, automotive, Nuance Mobile, Arnd Weil, explains, Nuance knows that the tug-of-war between embedded resources in cars, mobile devices and “in the cloud” is not a “winner-takes-all” battle. That’s why Nuance has opted for a hybrid approach which, in effect, will provide a much more robust user experience. Weil expects one of the first areas where users recognize improvements is in the area of “Points of Interest” (POIs) that has always been problematic for providers of in-car navigation systems. Taking a connected approach will allow the Dragon Drive system to take a more dynamic approach to handling input that includes POIs. The system will have a larger vocabulary and will do a better job of associating natural language input with geographic locations. As a result there will be no more guessing games and fewer outright FAILs.

The Dragon Drive system is already taking on more of the attributes of an in-car personal virtual assistant by moving from pure “command and control” of in-car systems to a natural language input approach to task completion. Because car manufacturers have made significant investment in their own, branded speech-enabled systems and services, Nuance does not aim to replace them. Rather, they plan to do a better job of bringing the right resources to bear in order for drivers to reach their objectives safely.

As for availability, the expanded Dragon Drive platform is available in 12 languages, including U.S. and U.K. English, Canadian and European French, American and European Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Japanese – with additional languages to be made available over the next year. It is currently deployed with Audi, BMW, Daimler and Toyota.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Nuance, Virtual Assistants, Telematics, Connected Care, Dragon Drive