Strewth, it's an Aussie voice app

Beverley Head
Thursday, 28 July 2011 15:50

IT Industry - Development

Australian app developers keen to integrate speech recognition into their apps for iOS 4.0 or Android 2.1 devices are the target for the local expansion of Nuance's Mobile Developer Programme which from today is providing support for Australian English in all its glory.

According to Stuart Sharpe, senior director for Nuance's Asia Pacific sales engineering, the software development kit being made available to local app developers now supports Australian accents and idioms, and will also recognise locally preferred date and location information.

The developer kit is available for free for the first 90 days for developers from Nuance's portal, although charges will apply once an app is launched. To date more than 3,000 app developers internationally have downloaded the company's software development kit which has been marketed in other regions for the last eight months and around 30 apps have been launched - including the voice activated Amazon Price Check.

Developers who launch a voice enabled app will be charged tiered fees for using the software - $1,000 for 50,000 transactions, $1,800 for 100,000 transactions (one transaction for example being counted as each individual price check).

Nuance's software development kit allows developers to leverage the dictation and voice search capabilities at the core of Dragon Apps and Nuance's Vocaliser text-to-speech functions. Other language support is available through the Nuance Mobile Developer Programme for Mandarin Chinese, US and UK English, European Spanish, European French, German, Italian and Japanese for dictation and search.

The text to speech function is supported for more than 35 languages.