Santa Clara, Calif. – Content navigation system developer Rovi is gearing up to make oral commands a bigger part of its guide services as evidenced by a disclosure Wednesday that it has expanded its relationship with Nuance Communications for voice-activated guidance and content discovery applications.
Nuance, which is best known for its ever evolving Dragon Naturally Speaking software architecture, signed a multi-year data licensing agreement for Rovi Video and Rovi Music and plans to integrate Rovi’s rich entertainment data for multiple countries with Nuance’s Dragon TV as well as Nuance’s broad mobile voice and language understanding platforms.
Dragon systems currently ship on hundreds of millions of devices, including televisions, PCs, tablets and mobile devices.
With the latest agreement, Rovi and Nuance are preparing to help service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers, PC vendors, and portal customers to quickly and easily create advanced and innovative services and solutions that access Rovi-indexed data on TV shows, movies, and music via voice, the companies said.
Rovi said the market for multi-service platforms has given rise to advanced, futuristic entertainment applications, which is addressed by offering high quality voice recognition, natural language understanding and guidance in devices ranging from tablets and phones to remote controls and TVs.
Rovi and Nuance said they expect to drive a consistent, cross-platform entertainment experience for the seamless discovery of movie and television content as well as new artists, songs or albums using the spoken word.
Rovi said the combined systems will enable voice-activated commands, such as people being able to say, “Recommend movies like ‘42’”; “Show me similar TV programs to ‘The Middle’”; “What else is Matthew McConaughey in?” and “Recommend summer songs like ‘Surfing Safari by the Beach Boys’.”
“Movies, shows, and music are key elements of the mobile experience that span TV, phones, tablets and PCs. And with so much content available, people need an effortless and intuitive way to access what they want, when they want it,” stated Matt Revis, Nuance Dragon Devices general manager/VP. “By expanding our capabilities to use Nuance’s voice and natural language understanding capabilities with Rovi’s broad movie, TV and music database, we’re able to bring the power of connected content to virtually any device.”
“We believe the expansion of our relationship with Nuance extends our role in voice-activated guidance and discovery of entertainment that is accessible from multiple devices via the cloud,” said Bob Shallow, Rovi product sales & marketing senior VP. “Our data and services include media analysis, search algorithms, and recommendation engines that, together with Nuance’s voice and natural language platforms, can power innovative applications that take the digital entertainment experience to new heights.”
