14 DAY TRIAL // Nuance Communications has announced that its voice technology now powers the voice search capabilities behind the new Merriam-Webster app for iPhone, the latest mobile app to take advantage Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search voice recognition technology.
Nuance’s product portfolio of speech and predictive text solutions is used by the world’s leading manufacturers and mobile operators, and are found in billions of phones and millions of automobiles and consumer electronic devices, according to the company.
This makes Nuance solutions some of the most pervasive on the market today, the company said.
The Merriam-Webster app is free. Downloadable from the iTunes App Store, it brings America's most useful and respected dictionary right to your iPhone, Nuance says.
The app’s voice search capabilities allows users to look up a word by simply pronouncing it, versus trying to spell it out.
This comes in handy when dealing with difficult or unfamiliar words.
Users are offered synonyms, antonyms, example sentences, audio pronunciations, Word of the Day, and more.
“For 150 years, Merriam-Webster has been working on making dictionaries easier to use,” said Miles Kronby, chief product officer of Digital, Merriam-Webster.
“Integrating Nuance's voice recognition capabilities into our app contributes to that evolution, and makes looking up a word more intuitive and for a lot of people more enjoyable,” said Kronby.
Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile added, “Mobile consumers need a quick, easy and effective way to access information and data, and nothing is more intuitive or natural than the human voice.”
“We’ve made it incredibly easy for developers like Merriam-Webster to optimize their app experience with our core Dragon voice technology, creating an ecosystem of voice-enabled applications that let consumers get the most out their mobile devices,” said Thompson.