Nuance and Bury Jointly Develop Speech-Enabled Telematics Solutions
biz.yahoo.com
Tuesday March 14, 8:00 am ET
Cooperation between Nuance and Bury delivers its first project for speech-enabled hands-free car kits
LOHNE, Germany & GHENT, Belgium--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 14, 2006--Nuance Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: NUAN) and Bury GmbH & Co KG today announced a partnership to jointly develop market-leading speech-enabled telematics solutions for the automotive market allowing hands-free voice dialing and SMS reading. The partnership has already secured its first contract with one of Europe's leading luxury car manufacturers. The first version of the product supports US and UK English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, with other languages to follow.
"The speech-enabled telematics unit improves ease-of-use and safety of the driver when using the telephone in the car," said Peter Hauser, general manager and senior vice president, Nuance International. "Given the strict legislation in most countries, hands-free car kits are indispensable for using the phone in the car. We are very pleased with this joint project with Bury and we are now looking to offer the solution more widely to the automotive sector."
When using the hands-free voice dialing solution the driver can simply speak any entry in their phone address book. The system then reads back the chosen name for confirmation in a natural-sounding, pleasant and intelligible text-to-speech voice. The driver can also control and edit the address book by voice, in a hands-free and eyes-free manner. As the solution is speaker-independent, the system is able to immediately recognize and pronounce the vast number of entries in a typical address book without being "trained" by a user. Since drivers cannot always look at a screen safely to verify a name or number, accurate text-to-speech voice feedback is critical to close the loop for any dialing instructions, ensuring the hands-free car kit system's effectiveness.
The system also informs the driver about incoming SMS messages, with the ability to read the messages to the driver. The so-called text normalisation algorithm is able to convert SMS specific mnemonics into natural output. For example, "Dear Jeff, I will be late this evening xoxo" will be read "Dear Jeff, I will be late this evening. Many kisses."
"The cooperation with Nuance has been very fruitful and we anticipate a lot of momentum for future projects and solutions," says Reinhard Meyer, commercial director, Bury.
Two Nuance® solutions were included in this joint project: VoCon® 3200 and RealSpeak(TM) Solo 4.0.
VoCon 3200 is the renowned embedded speech recognition engine from Nuance. This solution is speaker-independent, has continuous speech recognition and is especially tuned to meet the demanding accuracy requirements in noisy environments. VoCon 3200 can recognise very large vocabularies of 100,000+ names. The speaker adaptation functionality increases the individual recognition performance, by adapting the system to the car driver's voice. It supports 18 languages, covering all key European, Asian and North American languages.
RealSpeak(TM) Solo 4.0 is a text-to-speech solution, optimised to enhance embedded conversational applications. The solution provides outstanding natural-sounding voice quality output, which has been demonstrated in a number of industry benchmarks. RealSpeak comes with built-in support for abbreviations and foreign words. RealSpeak Solo supports 22 languages, many of these with different voices. |
