Nuance Communications Launches Nuance Mobile Speech Platform

ORLANDO, Fla. - Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) launched the Nuance Mobile Speech Platform. This architecture of tools and components provides mobile application developers with the ability to enhance their offerings with a speech experience - from speech recognition to text-to-speech - that enhances usability.

With applications designed on the Nuance Mobile Speech Platform, users can speak queries to find ringtones, locate the nearest Starbucks, search the Web, or dictate a complete SMS or email. Users can instruct their devices by voice to read back incoming messages, such as an SMS, or content, such as on-screen directions, using Nuance's latest text-to-speech technology.

The Nuance Mobile Speech Platform allows users to speak SMS or e-mail messages using speech recognition, the same technology that powers Nuance's Dragon NaturallySpeaking desktop dictation products. For mobile search queries, applications built using the Nuance Mobile Speech Platform allow users to 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 directed to the desired content.

"Recent usability research suggests over 65 percent of all mobile content is virtually invisible to users because it is too deeply hidden in a maze of confusing menu hierarchies," said Peggy Anne Salz, author of the Informa report Mobile Search and Content Discovery. "Mobile devices - with their screen-size limitations and restricted input capabilities - only exacerbate the problem. If operators want to sell more mobile content, then they're going to have to make finding it and buying it a no-brainer. Speech removes the pain from the content discovery process and the latest advances in speech recognition make voice search ready for prime-time. The Nuance Mobile Speech Platform is a solution mobile application developers can leverage to make content accessible and monetizable, creating value for developers, content providers and operators and vastly improving the user experience for consumers."

The Nuance Mobile Speech Platform can be used to speech-enable a mobile application, and specifically offers pre-built components for the following:

• Nuance Local Search - search business names and categories, residential listings, weather, dining and entertainment, movies, etc. 
• Nuance Mobile Navigation - voice destination entry (including street addresses, businesses and points of interest) and spoken turn-by-turn directions. 
• Nuance Content Search - search catalogs with items in music, video, games and more. 
• Nuance Mobile Web Search - search the Web from a mobile device. 
• Nuance Mobile Communications - compose email, SMS, and IM messages by speaking.

Mobile application developers can leverage the Nuance Mobile Speech Platform with the following components and tools:

• The Nuance Mobile Gateway 2.0 - provides device-independent access to Nuance's dual-recognizer architecture, and voice and language technologies over wireless IP networks via open interfaces to back-end application servers. 
• The Nuance Mobile Gateway 2.0 SDK - a small-footprint client SDK that gives developers device access to network-based speech recognition resources. 
• The Nuance Mobile Resource Manager - ensures supported deployments are load balanced and resilient for architectures. The result is interfaces built on Nuance's capabilities for deployments of voice applications. 
• The Nuance Mobile Management Station - enables OA&M tasks such as managing speech resources and grammars; reporting for application performance and usage that track metrics; event logging and reporting for troubleshooting and problem resolution; and provisioning information.

All applications are powered by Nuance's speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies. The Nuance Mobile Speech Platform is currently in Beta trials and will be generally available in 2007.