Nuance Showcases New Version of Mobile Speech Platform

Nuance Communications is set to showcase the newest version of its Nuance Mobile Speech Platform (NMSP) at the BREW 2008 Conference in San Diego. NMSP incorporates a variety of applications and features, including speech recognition, open-ended dictation, and text-to-speech, to improve the usability of BREW applications on mobile devices. 

BREW is one of the major software platforms for feature phones—mobile handsets that aren’t smartphones. Software is developed in C or C++. NMSP 2.5 offers prebuilt components for Nuance Local Search, which allows users to search business names and categories; Nuance Mobile Navigation, which allows for voice destination entry and provides turn-by-turn directions; Nuance Content Search, which searches for multimedia and games; and Nuance Mobile Web Search, which offers an open Web search from a mobile device.

"Intuitive for every user, speech makes for a richer, more satisfying mobile experience," Mike Thompson, Nuance’s vice president and general manager of Mobile Speech, said in a release. "BREW developers, handset vendors, and wireless carriers all benefit because easy-to-use applications and features drive additional revenue and eliminate the frustration of navigating through complex menu hierarchies with small keypads."

Recent months have seen the release of major mobile phone applications that leverage voice.  At the recent CTIA in Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced that it was adding a speech component to its oneSearch open search application, using speech technology provided by vlingo. And more recently, Microsoft subsidiary TellMe released a local search application for BlackBerrys.