CES 2012 Video: Voice recognition is the talk of the show

Consumer Reports News: January 11, 2012 12:23 PM

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Speech-based controls have become the center of attention among consumers, in part due to the success of Siri on mobile Apple products such as the latest iPhone. And voice recognition are among some of the features in new products—HDTVs, tablets, smart phones and even cars—on display at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show.

One of the leading software companies, Nuance Communications, revealed several new developments in the area of voice controls and discussed them with Consumer Reports Electronics Editor Paul Reynolds at the CES trade show.

One of the chief announcements from the show is its new relationship with chip-maker Intel. The partnership will allow voice-recognition programming to be implemented Intel's forthcoming ultrabooks computers on a much deeper and tighter scale.

Nuance Communications Vice President Richard Mack said that complex and intelligent voice control—like Apple iPhone's Siri, which interprets the meaning of what is being asked rather than simply returning search results based on terms in the request—requires much more than just a piece of software that sits on top of a device's operating system.

That relationship with Intel could be the model for other partnerships—say, with TV manufacturers to implement Nuance's Dragon TV, on display at CES, on their HDTVs.

If you'd like to try speech recognition, Nuance also announced its Dragon Go mobile app is now available for Android-powered smart phones, too. (The app had been available for iPhones for sometime.)

Watch Consumer Reports video on Nuance voice recognition technology for more information.

Nuance and Intel Announce Collaboration to Voice-Enable Ultrabook Devices [Press Release via BusinessWire]