It has taken three years, but Swype is finally losing its Beta tag and has hit the Google Play store. The app is available as a free trial version that’ll work for 30 days and a 99c version, and the two builds will eventually be available as a single version sometime in the future.

But are they a bit late? While Swype was busy getting its keyboard pre-installed on Android smartphones, competing apps such as SwiftKey, SlideIT, and TouchPal were going straight to the consumers. And also the gesture typing feature became available with Android 4.2.

But the folks at Swype, which is now a division of Nuance, are not too worried. Aaron Sheedy, Nuance’s VP of Mobile Product says, “Yeah, we might be late. That’s an honest concern. But the adoption of smartphones is still just so huge, and there’s a whole generation of people just coming online. Our language coverage is such that we’ll do really well in the [international] markets; we’ve got [support for] 62 languages, plus a bunch of dialects”. And also, OEMs are still paying licensing fees on every Swype-enabled device.

So far Swype seems to be getting good reviews from users who have installed it (unlike another new app). The free trial version is available here, and here’s the 99c version. If you are going for the paid version you better make it quick as the price is expected to go up in the coming weeks.

So, have you installed it yet? Interested in some swyping and driving?

[Source]

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The company Nuance has now released a major update to its Android App, Dragon Mobile Assistant.  The speech activated app already allowed the user to update their Twitter status, get directions and wake your device from sleep mode by saying “Hi Dragon”, but now the voice assistant has several new tricks up its virtual sleeves.

This beta release by Nuance now allows you to also play music with a simple command such as “I want to listen to Ashes of Abaddon”, set alarms by “Set the alarm to wake me at 1pm”  and launch apps with a quick “Open Pandora”.  While it is set to “Driver Mode”, Dragon is always listening and is totally hands free (to help you avoid those costly tickets).

The app previously was only available on Android 4.0 and later, but now can run on devices using Android 2.3 and up.

[ source ]

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You don’t need to have an R2-D2 unit in the back to talk to your vehicle. You even need to whip out your cell phone either, because Nuance Communications has officially unveiled Dragon Drive, a voice-based system that some are calling Siri for cars. I’m sure Apple appreciates the connection.

While there are already voice-based systems in cars, like Ford Sync by Microsoft, they can only do “local” things like change the song or adjust climate control. With Dragon Drive, the voice commands can extend to Nuance’s cloud-based language servers via 3G or 4G. This is not unlike the voice searches that you’d conduct on your smartphone of choice. Just like Siri, Dragon Drive can intepret context and intent, searching for information as needed. You just speak naturally, rather than having to follow a set voiced formula.

To be fair, you’re not getting “full” Siri functionality here. At least not yet, since Nuance is starting with just an SMS service via Dragon Drive. As adoption continues and grows, Nuance will layer on additional functions and features, like adapted versions of Dragon Dictation and DragonGo search. They could conceivably use Dragon Drive to look up real-time weather or traffic, or even find “recommended” songs that are similar to your existing playlist.

Is there another car that comes to mind when it comes to speaking naturally to your automobile? Nuance thinks so. EVP and GM Mike Thompason says, “We are already making KITT in many ways.”

[Source]

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The tech world is anxiously awaiting the arrival of Apple’s next generation iPad as well as the next version of their mobile OS, iOS 5.1. So far there hasn’t been any confirmation about the release date or the features of both the products. But it appears like some folks have gained access to a pre-GM version of iOS 5.1, screenshots of which have revealed upcoming features.

As you can see in the above image, iOS 5.1 may arrive with a new lockscreen camera slider. This will allow you to launch the camera app directly from the lockscreen with a vertical sliding action on the new icon. That’s certainly something that will be really useful for taking snaps quickly and easily.

Just in case you are wondering, you have to double press the home button for summoning up the camera button in current versions.  There were rumors flying around earlier that suggested Siri will be supporting Japanese iPhone 4S owners in the future. The above screenshot of Siri’s settings is evidence on the matter.  As you already know, Nuance is the driving force behind Siri and it’s worth noting that Nuance’s Dragon Dictation already supports Japanese. So a Japanese Siri is certainly not far away.

Rumors suggest that Apple will most likely release iOS 5.1 alongside iPad 3 on March 7th. But make sure you stay tuned to this space for updates.

The post iOS 5.1 Screenshots Reveal New Features appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

It looks like Siri now has a sister. A sister that is smarter, faster, and more resourceful. A sister that is more social too, playing friendly with both Android and iOS people. The sister’s name is Evi and this cross-platform voice assistant looks to be a serious challenger to Siri.

To be fair, there are other voice-based search assistants out there, but Evi by True Knowledge looks like it holds some seriously powerful potential. They say that the Evi app has “almost a billion facts,” as well as the ability to “infer trillions” from that. Evi also looks all around the web for you, gathering information from Google, GPS, Yelp, Wolfram Alpha, and more. There’s also the voting up and down of answers to help improve Evi’s effectiveness. Not surprisingly, Nuance is the tech behind the voice recognition.

Evi appears to have stronger logic and language reasoning too.

“If you ask “Who was President when Queen Elizabeth II was born?” Evi determines who Queen Elizabeth II is, when she was born and then compares this against which U.S. presidents were in office over that time, delivering the results of both serving U.S. presidents during those years. Siri cannot do this.”

And Evi can provide localized information for UK users, something that Siri still cannot do. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it looks like the True Knowledge servers have been overloaded by the flood of new users, so it doesn’t seem to be working. In any case, the iPhone version is available in the App Store for 99 cents, whereas the Android version is a free download.

The post Siri Meet Evi, The Voice Assistant For Android And iOS appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Nuance Communications Inc. today unveiled Dragon TV, a unique voice and natural language understanding platform for TV, device and set-top box OEMs and service operators. Dragon TV is all about making today’s living room experience easier with voice controls and the ability to access shows, movies and content in a way that adds both appeal and a sense of enjoyment for the average consumer.

Nuance’s natural language understanding technologies allow consumers to say virtually anything to quickly and easily discover shows, movies and more. For instance, people can say:

• “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”
• “Play David Guetta on Music Choice”

The company Nuance Communications is dominant in the auto, mobile, and health care markets with its speech recognition, and speech-to-text technologies.

This breakthrough technology means that sometime in the not so distant future you might start talking to your Dragon TV enabled television without any Siri intervention: sure, Siri was first at grabbing customers attention, but Nuance can stake its hold on a plethora of its patents for understanding human speech.

Either way, with voice technologies starting to hit the living room the universal remote may soon be a thing of the past.

[ source ]

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Imagine that you decided to take a trip over to Germany, but you don’t speak a word of German. You could whip out one of those phrasebooks, but there’s a good chance you’re going to butcher the pronunciation, not to mention that you won’t understand what the other person is saying either. That’s where Vocre comes in.

Presented at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, the Vocre app instantly translates your spoken word into another language. Just say what you want to say, and your smartphone will translate it on the spot and speak it out in the target language. You can then hold your phone in front of the local and have them do the same back to you.

This is quite the fascinating app. It’s not quite instant and you need to wait for the prompts, but it sure beats trying to communicate with charades and broken German. The speech to text part is handled by Nuance, but the translation is said to go beyond Google Translate, using crowd-sourced learning technology. The idea is to mak e the conversation a little more natural.

Right now, it looks like Vocre is being targeted for iOS only. You get your first 10 translations free and then additional packs of 10 more translations are 99 cents. Language support includes English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. More languages are on the way.

Although we interviewed Vocre and got a demo, the background noise was less than ideal and did not give accurate translations.  It seems Vocre works quite well in quite situations, but if in a noisy restaurant or busy street corner it may not be as accurate as shown in the video.

The post Vocre: The instant translation app for iPhone conversationalists appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

T9 Trace

You simply swipe your finger across the screen to form words rather than tapping on individual letters. Much like conventional T9 predictive text on a numeric keypad, T9 Trace will try its best to predict the word you’re trying to spell, even if your finger-swiping isn’t 100% accurate.

Does that sound familiar? It should. The technology and interface sounds identical to Swype, a predictive touchscreen text keyboard that has already been available for a little while now. Just like T9 Trace, Swype gets you to run a single finger across the screen to spell out your words.

So, what’s the difference? I’m not entirely sure. It is interesting to note, however, that the founder and CTO of Swype also happened to be the co-inventor of the original T9 predictive text system. Check the video of Swype below and see how similar the two are.

The post Nuance T9 Trace offers fast touchscreen text like Swype appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

By now, you’ve probably become familiar with T9 predictive text technology. If you’ve ever owned just about any cell phone and you’ve sent a text message, there’s a good chance that you’ve used it. From Nokia to Motorola, nearly all phones with numeric keypads use this great system. So, how does it translate to the modern arena?

Bringing a similar concept to the increasingly popular touchscreen format is the newly unveiled Nuance T9 Write predictive text technology. Designed for pen-based and touchscreen devices, this “innovative handwriting technology” offers “multi-touch gestures and on-top writing capabilities.”

Nuance T9 Write combines handwriting input, which is particularly popular with Asian languages, with Nuance XT9 predictive text technology. This works with more than 40 different languages and it’ll recognize naturally shaped letters, numbers, symbols, and punctuation.

You know how the predictive text on the iPhone starts to understand which words you use the most often, adapting accordingly over time? Nuance T9 Write does the same kind of thing, learning “each user’s preferred vocabulary and even adds new words based on user communication patterns.”

Going one step further, you can even get it to recognize abbreviations for commonly-used phrases, email addresses and other frequently used words. The “on top” technology means that you write each letter on top of one another, rather than across the screen. And yes, it does multi-touch.

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