With its focus squarely on the automotive market, Nuance announced that it has joined ng Connect, an intercompany, interdisciplinary wireless development initiative founded in 2009 by Alcatel-Lucent. The consortium is a mixed bag of technology providers, that include (in addition to ALU) “name brand” IT infrastructure providers like HP, NCR, QNX Software and Gemalto along with mobile device makers like Samsung and Kyocera (which makes its own phones as well as Sanyo), joined by application and content providers like RebelVox, Atlantic Recordings, BUZZMedia and about twenty others.

The focus of ng Connect is LTE, referring to the “Long Term Evolution” of 3G mobile, a term which, itself is trademarked by the 3GPP (3G Partnership Project). Both the 3GPP and ng Connect seek to develop applications and services that take advantage of the high throughput, low latency and plug-and-play nature of the underlying technologies. It is considered a stepping stone toward the 4G (and the as-yet unspecified 5G) environments which promise higher speeds and larger cell sizes. In joining ng Connect, Nuance is the lone provider of key speech processing technologies (Automated Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech) as well as the predictive texting applications that can fulfill requirements for the new requirements for command, information input and dialog that users of mobile applications require.

Toyota, though its U.S. Sales Division, is the lone automobile manufacturer participating in ng Connect. Nuance has already had its speech processing technologies integrated into the Ford SYNC system (along with Microsoft and BSquare). Through its participation in ng Connect, Nuance hopes to benefit from sharing results of shared customer research, technology development and market conditioning and promotion. In the automotive domain, Loquendo is probably Nuance’s most direct competitor (with well-accepted solutions in “embedded” text-to-speech and speech recogntion, well-suited for both in-car systems and mobile phones).

Yet there is no better place than a moving car to showcase the value of high-speed, wireless links and low-latency access to shared resources built around maps, games, social networks and associated data stores. Accurate speech processing is important, but so is elegant orchestration of real-time transactions, asynchronous and synchronous conversations and a broad variety of interactions. In the car Microsoft, with Bing Search, Maps and active Windows development community of developers are already pitted against Google with its voice search, maps and Android developers. Joining the ng Connect community immediately expands Nuance’s hooks into a broader community of technology providers that stand ready to cooperate to bring more services to market.

The track record for these types of consortia is spotty. While participants profess to promote an “open” or shared approach to solution development, participating companies have shown a pre-disposition to protect their brands and their perceived competitive advantage. Still, we wish them luck.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, Nuance, speech-enabled mobile services, Recombinant Communications