SAN FRANCISCO—Speech solution specialist Nuance Communications announced the commercial availability of Nuance’s VSuite software on several new Motorola handsets in the United States.
Motorola expanded its offering to the latest commercial version of Nuance’s VSuite 3 to deliver hands-free voice control capabilities to new CDMA handset models, including the V755, V750, VE20 and V950.
Nuance’s mobile speech solutions range from simple voice dialing to speech-based Web search. Nuance is giving demos during this week’s CTIA I.T. & Entertainment convention showing its voice search, which allows end-users to speak what they’re searching for. The product goes one step further in that it will do contextual work behind the scenes to interpret exactly what the user is looking for, thereby getting more accurate results, according to Mike Wehrs, vice president of industry affairs and evangelism for Nuance. Nuance is using a partner for the search function but isn’t identifying the partner or partners.
People usually don’t speak the way they type in commands into a search engine online. So Nuance’s software will convert the words into meaningful text that a search engine would normally get. “Our software takes what you said and what we think you’re trying to get at, then submits keywords to partners,” he said.
Wehrs said he recently demonstrated the product at an executive dinner. He used voice commands to find a good recipe for lemon meringue pie. In return, the system came back with award-winning recipes.
Last month, Nuance announced it is acquiring SNAPin, which develops self-service handset-based technology. That acquisition is still on schedule, he said.