Nuance Adds Voice to New Samsung Galaxy Gear and Galaxy Note 3
Samsung's new Galaxy Gear wearable smartwatch device and Samsung Galaxy Note 3 integrate Nuance Communications' voice and language capabilities as part of Samsung's expanding lineup of S-Voice powered devices.
This marks the first use of Nuance's voice and intelligent systems-based technology into the wearables category as part of a larger expansion of Nuance Cloud Services. Samsung already integrated Nuance's voice technology across handsets, tablets, and TVs.
"This is the first iteration, just like tablets when they came out," says Gary Clayton, chief creative officer at Nuance.
"You will talk to the watch and the watch will talk to you. And, then it will have a personality. Secondly, this kind of single set of functions will manifest across lots of different devices and operating systems. There will be many similar devices in the future," he predicts.
People can communicate with these devices through voice and natural language, allowing the user interface to become almost invisible and the experience an organic interaction as part of the day to day, Clayton says.
With the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch, users can call, text, schedule, open social channels, set alarm, and search the weather, among other commands. "Speech elevates the handiness of such devices. Because it can connect to our cloud services, it can access much of the same kinds of data that our phone apps or desktop apps can access, such as contact info or calendar info," Clayton says.
Wearable voice-enabled devices, Clayton says, are here to stay.
"Intelligent systems will continue to drive an exciting future for wearables, where ambient and artificial intelligence will seed a generation of wearables that adapt and predict a person's needs with assistant-like precision, understanding context, preferences, and a range of information relevant to the user, and, through both voice and gesture backed by NLU."
Clayton also cites data from Strategy Analytics that projects 15 million wearable tech devices to be sold worldwide in 2013; sales are predicted to increase to 75 million devices by 2017.
"There is no end for the possibilities of voice. It's rapidly evolved and is no longer simply recognition and speech synthesis," Clayton contends. "Voice is now an incredibly sophisticated system built on language understanding and [artificial intelligence] that ultimately simplifies the way we can converse with devices."
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