Nuance Unveils Dragon TV

At the Consumer Electronics Show Monday, Nuance Communications introduced Dragon TV, a voice and natural language understanding platform for all major TV, set-top box, remote control, and application platforms, including Linux, Android, and iOS.

Using Nuance's voice and natural language understanding capabilities, Dragon TV allows viewers to find content by speaking channel numbers, station names, and show and movie names. Users can also search for content by actor and genre, and stay connected via Twitter, Facebook, and Skype. In addition, with Nuance's Far-Talk technology, Dragon TV can break through interferences of multiple acoustic sources. Pricing has yet not been released.

Strategy Analytics forecasts an estimated 1.6 billion TVs will be connected to the Web by 2014. Nuance pointed out that governments and standards bodies are now mandating accessible solutions for TV, and by leveraging Nuance’s core speech technologies and natural language understanding, Dragon TV will make television accessible to everyone.

"Traditional search on televisions is tedious and amazingly outdated," said Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, in a statement. "Dragon TV brings an amazing voice experience directly to the living room, similar to what people do every day on their phones and in their cars."