Nuance and Bury Jointly Develop Speech-Enabled Telematics Solutions
LOHNE, Germany & GHENT, Belgium - Nuance Communications, Inc. and Bury GmbH & Co KG partnered to jointly develop speech-enabled telematics solutions for the automotive market allowing hands-free voice dialing and SMS reading. The partnership has already secured its first contract with one of Europe's luxury car manufacturers. The first version of the product supports U.S. and U.K. English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, with other languages to follow.
When using the hands-free voice dialing solution the driver can speak any entry in their phone address book. The system then reads back the chosen name for confirmation in a text-to-speech voice. The driver can also control and edit the address book by voice, in a hands-free and eyes-free manner. As the solution is speaker-independent, the system is able to recognize and pronounce the entries in a typical address book without being "trained" by a user.
The system also informs the driver about incoming SMS messages, with the ability to read the messages to the driver. The text normalization algorithm is able to convert SMS specific mnemonics into natural output. For example, "Dear Jeff, I will be late this evening xoxo" will be read "Dear Jeff, I will be late this evening. Many kisses."
Two Nuance® solutions were included in this joint project: VoCon® 3200 and RealSpeak™ Solo 4.0.
VoCon 3200 is the embedded speech recognition engine from Nuance. This solution is speaker-independent, has continuous speech recognition and is tuned for noisy environments. VoCon 3200 can recognize large vocabularies of 100,000+ names. The speaker adaptation functionality adapts the system to the car driver's voice. It supports 18 languages, covering all key European, Asian and North American languages.
RealSpeak™ Solo 4.0 is a text-to-speech solution, optimized to enhance embedded conversational applications. The solution provides voice output. RealSpeak comes with built-in support for abbreviations and foreign words. RealSpeak Solo supports 22 languages, many of these with different voices.