MONETISING MOBILE: Nuance talks voice recognition in apps and cars

EMEA marketing manager for mobile Reimund Schmald on the opportunities in store.

"I'm not talking about the sexy stuff!" warned Reimund Schmald from Nuance as he took the stage at ME's Monetising Mobile conference tonight in London. He was here to talk about how the company's voice recognition technology is being used in apps, and also in cars.

Nuance launched its iPhone app in December 2009, and has so far launched it in 19 languages in 21 countries, with five more coming this year: Poland on Monday being the first of those. "We have more than 13 million downloads so far worldwide, and we handle more than one million transactions per day" - transactions being files uploaded from the app to be converted into text.

"The people like this technology and it's definitely the future," he said. "More to come, but I can't speak of this..." referring presumably to the rumoured integration of Nuance's technology in Apple's iOS 5 software.

Nuance's technology is also in more than 50 million cars and more than 50 million portable navigation devices, and is keen for developers to start using its technology in their own apps, through its NDEV programme. "To date, we have already more than 4,000 developers on this platform," he said. The platform supports iOS, Android and Windows Phone.

What is the next step? "You say something, we deliver the transcription plus the understanding of this: the meaning of the transcription," said Schmald. This is Nuance's Dragon Go service. "You want to search for Barack Obama on Twitter or Ashton Kutcher on Facebook, and it immediately goes to the Twitter or the Facebook site and gives you what you wanna have," he said.