Nuance Unveils Personal Assistants and Keyboards for Wearable Devices

Nuance Communications today debuted Dragon Mobile Assistant and Nuance's Swype keyboard for smartwatches at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. At the show, Nuance will demonstrate how device makers can bring Nuance's personal assistant features and predictive input keyboard capabilities to an array of emerging consumer electronics.

"Wearable technology marks an important evolution in the way people interact with devices," said Michael Thompson, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, in a statement. "Leveraging our powerful Nuance Cloud Services, we are creating intelligent systems optimized for devices with smaller screens where buttons and menus are not practical, or perhaps even not possible. Wearables were made for voice, natural language understanding, and Swype."

Working with Omate, Nuance is unveiling the vision for Dragon Mobile Assistant for wearable devices, which will be displayed on Omate's TrueSmart Android smartwatch at CES. Dragon Mobile Assistant brings a customizable personal assistant to the smartwatch experience. People can simply speak to their watch to make calls, send emails or text messages, set reminders, manage their calendar, search the Web, and update social media. With a quick flick from the watch face, users can immediately access game scores from their favorite sports team, quotes for their most important stocks, restaurant recommendations, and the local weather.

"Dragon Mobile Assistant demonstrated on the Omate TrueSmart showcases how intelligent assistants are creating a new generation of wearable devices," said Laurent Le Pen, CEO of Omate, in a statement. "The ability to simply speak to the device on your wrist to send emails, text messages, set reminders, and search the Web is an incredibly compelling and rich experience that we at Omate are thrilled to work on with Nuance."

Nuance will also be demonstrating new Dragon Mobile Assistant features that facilitate music discovery and home automation as part of the wearable device experience. Through the utilization of music recognition technology from Gracenote, Nuance is making it easier to identify songs playing, discover new artists, and connect to music services. Users who like a song that is playing can say, "Hello Dragon, what song is this?" and using Gracenote technology and metadata, Dragon Mobile Assistant will identify the artist, album, and track. From there, wearable device users can launch playlists from popular cloud-music services.

Additionally, Nuance will demonstrate how Dragon Mobile Assistant integrates connected lighting pioneer Philips' API for the new Philips Hue lighting system to command and control lighting just by speaking to your smartwatch. For instance, users can say, "Switch the lights to reading mode," or "Change the lights to something energizing," to ensure a lighting environment always suits their moods.

Nuance will also be showcasing its Swype keyboard designed specifically for smaller screen devices, such as the smartwatch. Swype's predictive input lets people use a finger to glide from one letter to the next to quickly and easily input text. Nuance's Swype prototype for wearables also supports handwriting input for wearable devices along with the ability to choose from a variety of mini-keyboard layouts in both U.S. English and Korean.

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