Nuance, a speech recognition company, is working with giants BMW, Samsung and Panasonic to develop intelligent assistants for vehicle-related applications.
The accuracy of speech recognition is becoming more important by the day. With the possibility of big players such as Ford and Google mass producing self-driving cars, we need to be able to communicate safely and quickly with our vehicles.
The vehicle not only needs to understand various accents, but also needs to understand what the driver wants to do or know.
For example, if the driver says, “Car, Lion’s game,” the computer should know to report the score of the most recent, or currently in progress, Lion’s game. The car needs to be able to understand this phrase among any number of other potential phrases that a person may say who seeks the same information.
Quality speech recognition can save lives
The last thing we need, as a society, is people becoming infuriated on the road because the voice recognition is flaky. This is where Nuance comes in to save the day.
Nuance is a general voice recognition company. They don’t work only with the auto industry, but with the entire internet of things.
Nuance is working on a product that is currently in beta that targets developers which they have named Nuance Mix. Their goal is to create not just a voice recognition system, but a system that developers can use to create application specific voice recognition solutions.
It is of little use for the car to understand how to make the perfect martini, much like it is of little use for the blender to understand how to locate the nearest auto shop.
Sure, being able to ask any device to pull down whatever information from the internet at a whim and have it communicate it back in an intelligent matter is awesome, but that goes beyond an application specific task to general computing.
There is a reason the desktop computer is losing favor amongst the non-professional and non-gaming crowd. Tablets and smartphones fill two very important application specific goals. Cost and distraction.
Sure, what Nuance is doing is important for auto manufacturers, BMW clearly sees that, but it’s also important for the entire automation industry. We don’t want our garage door to open when we say, “Lights on,” with an accent.