There are a lot of bad Siri imitators in the Android Market, but Monday night a pretty close approximation to Apple’s now-iconic personal assistant will be available. Nuance Communications is launching an Android version of Dragon Go, it’s voice-powered semantic search app.
As the year winds down, here’s a look back at the biggest, most significant things that happened in the apps we use on our smartphones and tablets this year, as well as the most important themes to watch out for come 2012.
Nuance has acquired Vlingo in a combination of two of the most prominent independent speech companies left, as mobile companies continue to…
Nuance and voice recognition rival Vlingo have put away their knives and are now set to become one company with the announcement today that Nuance was buying its competitor. The two companies are set to take on the exploding opportunity in providing natural language interfaces.
Apps such as InstantMeeting, Expensify and yes, Siri are taking mundane tasks that top managers might have hired an assistant to handle and makes delegating them affordable for all. This is a welcome break for time-strapped workers called on to do more.
Apple’s use of the Siri voice assistant in the iPhone 4S has been one of the most-talked about features on the new device, but Apple (NSDQ:…
Vlingo, a voice recognition start-up, isn’t sweating the introduction of Apple’s Siri voice action and AI system. In fact, the start-up saw its best week last week with five consecutive days of record usage with voice actions up 50 percent daily over the previous high.
So will Apple’s Siri be like Facetime, widely praised and less widely used? Or will it be like touch screens that ushered in new ways of interacting with handsets? Folks in the speech recognition and virtual assistant market are hoping it’s the latter.
In a crowded market for speech recognition, Vlingo will focus on becoming a personal assistant, signaling an evolution from voice as a user interface and a means to avoid cramped keyboards, to voice as a natural means of getting a computer to do what you want.
Vlingo today added voice support to Foursquare on Android handsets, allowing Foursquare users to check in, find friends and send shouts through speech-to-text. Vlingo users can also update their social status in both Facebook and Twitter by using the Vlingo widget and speaking their update.
