Nuance buys Vlingo to improve voice control in electronic devices

Nuance, the folks who bought Swype in October and also are behind what makes Siri works has gone and bought Vlingo – the voice control application folks have been enjoying on Symbian for a long time (as well as BlackBerry and Android). I remember how cool it was the first time using it. It wasn’t perfect but it opened up new possibilities of phone interaction.

The amount Vlingo has been purchased for is unspecified. The aim of the purchase is to create natural language interfaces for multitude of devices.

Voice control isn’t useful all the time, but then it does have situations where it can be very useful – possibly THE most useful form of input. It just needs to be more natural.

The first thing to break is the need to even press a button. How would it know when you’re addressing it? Perhaps a keyword like Xbox Kinect – saying “xbox” blah blah (though that then breaks the whole natural thing, unless you can of course call your phone a name, lol). e.g. Hey Lumia, open my uni notes from yesterday please, and send a copy to group 23.

Source: TheVerge

Cheers moep for the tip

Category: Nokia