If I were Apple I'd launch the iPhone with Nuance speech recognition

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 03 December 2006 10:34

Your IT - Mobility

According to Nuance, applications built using the Nuance Mobile Speech Platform allow users to simply say, "Um, find the Starbucks on Main Street please," or "I'm looking for, ah … Justin Timberlake ringtones," or "What poker games can I download?" to be quickly directed to the desired content.

Nuance claims it can be used to "speech enable virtually any mobile application," but Nuance offers a number of pre-built components for applications such as Local Search – search business names and categories, residential listings, etc; Mobile Navigation; Web Search – search the Web in an unconstrained fashion from a mobile device; and Mobile Communications "compose email, SMS and IM messages simply by speaking in an open-ended, natural, and continuous fashion."

Of particular interest to Apple would be Content Search: "search catalogues with millions of items in music, video, games and more."

Nuance says the system is "currently in Beta trials and will be generally available in 2007." At its launch in Australia last week Peter Chidiac, Nuance's regional director Asia Pacific and Japan for speech solutions, said that the company had a number of trials underway, none of which could be named.

I have no inside information to suggest that Apple could be one of them but speech seems like a logical, and the ultimate solution to the perennial problem of designing a user interface for a mobile device with limited mechanical and visual 'real estate' and an ever expanding range of possibilities. One day, I would suggest voice will be the primary means of delivering instructions of all kinds to mobile devices.

In its personal computers Apple has always been a pioneer of technologies that later became mainstream: mini discs, no discs, WiFi, flat screens, firewire, ExpressCard. What a coup if it could come out with an iPhone using a radical new technology for both phone and 'iPod' type functions.