Nuance Communications and Gracenote Expand Partnership

LAS VEGAS - Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) and Gracenote entered a joint partnership to develop and market speech-enabled solutions for digital music collections on mobile devices. The partnership expands joint development efforts established in January 2005 to develop speech-enabled automotive entertainment solutions. The companies will demonstrate the new mobile functionality in Booth # 5044 at CTIA Wireless 2006, being held this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The joint offering provides a voice-activated interface to select a song, artist or playlist on MP3-enabled mobile devices. This combined solution uses underlying speech capabilities from Nuance and Gracenote's MediaVOCS phonetic database and playlist navigation to allow users to find and play the music stored on their mobile devices. Nuance's text-to-speech engine for the mobile environment then delivers verbal feedback for hands-free and eyes-free activation and selection verification.

The combined Nuance and Gracenote solution allows mobile device manufacturers to deploy speech recognition technology in all types of MP3-enabled phones. In addition, the solution will enable consumers to manage their mobile music collections by using voice command-and-control to:

• Navigate to all media: 
  • Play any individual song out of a collection, just by saying its name
  • Hear a new mix, such as music from specific genres, artists, albums, regions, decades, or years
• Playlist new custom mixes:
  • Describe any combination of qualities of the music they want to hear using speech - such as "60s Detroit Soul" to generate new mixes
  • Keep in the mood of the song currently playing by asking for "More like this"
• Find information on artists and songs: 
  • Consumers will be able to get more information on a favorite song they've been hearing by asking, "What is this?"