14 DAY TRIAL // Motorola’s Moto X, the first smartphone that the mobile phone maker has launched under Google’s leadership, comes with an always-on speech recognition feature that has now been found to be powered by Nuance’s Dragon technology.
Nuance’s Dragon Speech Recognition Software powers Apple’s Siri, and Samsung’s S Voice features as well, but it seems that Nexus 5, the latest Google phone out there, does not have it.
As software engineer Siggi Simonarson notes, this means that the new LG smartphone does not come to the market with the same always listening capabilities as the Moto X, although its Snapdragon 800 CPU is capable of low-power audio processing.
The most interesting aspect of the deal, however, is the fact that Google does have its own set of speech recognition services, yet it opted for another company’s solution instead.
Siggi Simonarson took some time to decompile the Touchless Control APK, and published a screenshot with the com > nuance > dragon > toolkit folder inside it.
As Simonarson notes, this state of facts explains while Android 4.4 KitKat did not arrive on devices with the same speech recognition capabilities right from the start: Google would have had to pay royalties for each of the devices launched with the feature.
For those out of the loop, we should note that Moto X allows users to interact with it through simply saying the “Okay, Google now” hotword.
Given the fact that Nuance has a patent on the feature, it makes perfect sense why Google decided to include this technology inside the Moto X but not in Nexus 5, as cultofandroid notes.
All in all, it appears that those who would like to be able to easily interact with their Android-based devices by using only their voice, even when the smartphone is locked, should go for a Moto X for the time being.
Whether Google will decide to add similar functionality inside some other Android 4.4 devices out there or not, it remains to be seen.