14 DAY TRIAL // Nuance Communications has announced and released Dragon TV, a natural language understanding platform for connected TVs.
Apple has been rumored for quite a while to plan the unveiling of a full-fledged HD TV set featuring the Siri voice recognition software as its remote control. It appears that Nuance, whose technology is licensed in part to Apple, has beaten them to it.
Dragon TV aims to make it easy to find and access shows, movies and other types of content via its voice and natural language understanding capabilities.
According to the company’s press release, “Dragon TV creates the ‘lean-back experience’ consumers demand, with the ability to easily find content by speaking channel numbers, station names, show and movie names. People can even search for content by actor and genre – and stay connected via Twitter, Facebook and Skype.”
Nuance offers examples for a few commands that Dragon TV will be able to take up, such as "Go to PBS"; "What's on Bravo at 9 p.m. tonight?"; "When is Ellen on?"; "Watch Dexter on DVR"; "Find comedies with Vince Vaughn"; and "Play David Guetta on Music Choice".
Using it you’ll be able to do email, connect to instant messaging services, and even social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Skype.
For these types of activities, according to Nuance, you’ll be able to say stuff like: "Send message to Julie, 'Old School is on TBS again this weekend – super excited'"; "Send update to Facebook, 'Anyone else looking forward to Celebrity Wife Swap?'”; or "Call John via Skype".
Per the product’s fact sheet, vendors will be able to integrate the highly flexible Dragon TV software across embedded, connected and hybrid modes.
The most interesting part, however, is that Dragon TV supporting all major TV, set-top box, remote control and application platforms, including Linux, Android and (you guessed it!) iOS.