Burlington, MA. – May 16, 2016 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced that it is extending its Dragon TV solution with its Nuance Mix NLU developer platform, giving cable operators and TV manufacturers the ability to create customized conversational experiences for their TVs, remotes, set-top boxes, smart home companion apps and content services. Nuance will be demonstrating Dragon TV and Nuance Mix’s ability to extend the smart TV experience into an Internet-of-Things driven connected home at 2016 INTX and at the INTX Imagine Park on May 18th.
A recent McKinsey Connected Homes report found that 50% of consumers who own two or more connected home devices would like a universal hub. But without the ability to quickly and easily engage these devices, IoT devices can quickly go from intelligent to inconvenient.
“Voice is already proving to be an incredibly valuable element of the connected TV user interface. We’ve powered billions of voice transactions in Smart TVs with nearly 75% of consumers using the voice interface when available,” said Kenn Harper, vice president, Nuance Devices and Ecosystem. “Voice will have a similar impact on the Smart Home as conversational interactions are key to user adoption among the Internet of Things. Cable operators and TV manufacturers have a signification opportunity to extend their TV experience to other devices in the home. With the average user spending more time in front of their TV than any other digital fixture in the home, the voice interface from the TV is primed to serve as a central hub for the household.”
Nuance’s Dragon TV platform already powers millions of smart TVs globally, giving manufacturers and service providers the ability to customize and integrate voice-enabled command and control and content search – all optimized for the TV experience. By offering the Dragon TV functionality from within the Nuance Mix platform, not only can TV providers get immediate access to all the existing Dragon TV functionality, but they can now use the Nuance Mix development tools to build fully custom natural language interactions to control other apps and devices in the home, such as the thermostat, lighting, home security systems, music speakers, and much more.
For example, with a single user interface on the TV someone can simply say “find me dramas with Bruce Willis,” then ask “who is at the front door” to get a live video stream from an integrated home security system, then quickly ask the TV to “dim the lights” to control their smart lighting system just in time for the start of the movie. And with Dragon TV’s voice biometrics, the smart home experience becomes incredibly personalized in an environment where many connected devices are shared. Dragon TV’s voice biometrics also gives parents the ability to control program access for younger viewers.
Nuance Mix Delivers the Most Open, Flexible Set of Voice Development Tools
Nuance Mix gives developers access to the same foundational technology that powers some of the world’s most pervasive virtual assistants, built on Nuance’s leading AI and cognitive capabilities. Coupled with Nuance’s leading voice recognition and text-to-speech, developers can use Mix to create custom voice and natural language models within minutes that are fully optimized to work together to deliver incredible accuracy for a set of tasks defined by the developer.
And Nuance Mix offers a unique ability to automate a workflow and roll anonymized speech data back into their models to continuously improve accuracy. As a result, the user experience continues to improve over time – and developers gain behavioral insights into new features that can or should be powered by voice.
Nuance Mix offers the most comprehensive set of speech tools and services for IoT and consumer electronics, and is an open platform offering cross operating system and cross platform support through open internet protocols like WebSockets. And for ease of development, Nuance Mix offers SDKs for iOS and Android, as well as for sample applications in popular languages including Python, C, Javascript, and more.
Dragon TV powered by Nuance Mix will be made available this summer, supporting US and UK English, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. Nuance Mix also provides access to Nuance’s Speech Kit SDK with support for more than 40 languages for voice recognition, and more than 80 distinct voices for text-to-speech.
Learn more about Nuance Mix and Dragon TV at Nuance’s booth 1654 at INTX and development opportunities for the connected home and TV. Can’t make it to INTX? Check out Nuance Mix and Dragon TV in action here.
Nuance’s portfolio of voice, touch and natural language understanding innovations are defining a new generation of intelligent systems and personal assistant technologies. With Nuance technology, people experience more humanized interactions with the world’s best phones, tablets, computers, cars, TVs, apps and services from leading manufacturers, network operators and service providers.
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About Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Communications, Inc. is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.
Nuance and the Nuance logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States of America and/or other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
Media Contact:
Rebecca Paquette
Nuance Communications
781-565-5264