Nuances Dragon Drive Adds Voice to Kenwood In-Car Infotainment System
Nuance Communications today announced that its Dragon Drive voice capabilities are behind the new voice-enabled Kenwood Audio Visual Navigation (AVN) systems with DVD entertainment, the Excelon DNN990HD and DNN9230DAB models in North America and Europe, respectively. Kenwood's connected infotainment system serves up navigation, content, music, calendar access, RSS newsfeeds, message dictation, and much more, all by voice.
Kenwood's connected receiver leverages Nuance's advanced Dragon Drive natural language understanding, voice, and text-to-speech capabilities optimized for the in-car experience. As a result, people can simply speak their social media status and quick email, while Nuance's text-to-speech reads incoming messages, including RSS newsfeeds and Twitter and Facebook updates. People can also speak to access weather updates and their calendars, find music, and more. The connected receiver also features Route Collector, a service allowing the user to store and share their trip logs, routes, and photos taken during travel.
"Consumers want to engage with their favorite apps safely and productively behind the wheel," said Scott Caswell Kenwood executive, in a statement. "By voice-enabling our in-car experience, we are transforming the in-car experience and creating a deeper sense of connectivity on the open road."
"The connected experience doesn't stop behind the wheel. The cloud brings us infinite opportunities for dynamic maps, music, messaging and social content, but safety cannot be sacrificed for the sake of connectivity," said Arnd Weil, vice president and general manager of automotive at Nuance Mobile, in a statement. "Kenwood is yet another example of the automotive industry deeply integrating Nuance's automotive optimized technologies to deliver a safer, smarter connected experience for aftermarket offerings."
The North American deployment (Excelon DNN990HD) will support U.S. English, Mexican Spanish, and Canadian French while the European version (DNN9230DAB) will support U.K. English, European Spanish, European French, German, Italian, and Dutch. In addition, the connected receiver supports a variety of languges for text readout, including Arabic, Greek, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, and Turkish.
Dragon Drive is Nuance's automotive-grade platform to deliver connected and embedded capabilities, such as voice dialing, message dictation, navigation, as well as local business, news, and music search Dragon Drive lets motorists speak naturally with in-car systems and directly access mobile content through a conversational interface.