Nuance Dragon Drive Gives Mercedes-Benz Owners News on the Road
Nuance Mobile has announced the availability of the Dragon Drive-powered Mercedes News App in Mercedes-Benz vehicles, allowing drivers to listen to articles from a number of news channels while driving.
Mercedes-Benz's News App is part of the COMAND Online connected in-car system. The app lets drivers review the day's top news stories, as well as other news categories such as domestic, international, economy, politics, or technology. The updated News App takes advantage of Nuance's text-to-speech technology, which adds the ability to read out news with humanlike high-quality voices optimized for in-car readout. Nuance's text-to-speech technology becomes increasingly natural over time as the technology adapts and learns to pronounce new words and phrases, such as Gangnam Style, or names in the news.
"The Mercedes-Benz News App is yet another way our powerful voice capabilities are keeping drivers informed and connected without adding dangerous distractions," said Arnd Weil, vice president and general manager of automotive at Nuance Mobile, in a statement. "Nuance's expressive text-to-speech creates a more natural and personalized experience for consumers, while providing automakers like Mercedes with an incredibly humanlike voice that is well-integrated with their brand experience."
Nuance's voice technologies have long been available as part of Mercedes-Benz infotainment systems, supporting a range of capabilities, including voice dialing, voice destination, and music search entry.
The updated News App with text-to-speech readout is available to Mercedes drivers in newly sold cars with COMAND Online as of June 2013, with rollout throughout the remainder of the year across North America, Europe, and Asia in more than 20 languages, including German, English UK, English US, French, Italian, Spanish (Castillian), Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Polish, Czech, Greek, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, and Arabic.
Dragon Drive is a part of Nuance's broad Dragon portfolio, including Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Dragon Dictate for Mac, Dragon Assistant for Ultrabook, Dragon Mobile Assistant, Dragon Dictation, Dragon Go!, Dragon TV, and Dragon ID.