Rovi and Nuance to Advance Voice Activated Guidance and Content Discovery

Rovi and Nuance Communications are collaborating to further accelerate voice-activated discovery and guidance applications for cable service providers and consumer electronics manufacturers.

Nuance has licensed and will be integrating Rovi's rich entertainment data with Dragon TV to allow TV manufacturers and cable service providers to access the wide variety of Rovi-indexed content for TV shows, movies, and cast and crew details just by speaking. Dragon TV is Nuance's voice and language understanding platform for set-top boxes and connected TV devices.

Nuance and Rovi are also developing a new application that marries Dragon TV with Rovi's guide technology. The result is the ability to speak to change the channel and browse, bookmark, and search for content on both live and on-demand TV programming. For instance, people can say, "Find comedies with Adam Sandler," "Show me information on 'The Big Bang Theory,'" and even "Who plays Chuck on Gossip Girl?"

"Consumers love that today's cable services and program guides offer so many options for shows, movies, content, information widgets, and more. But without an easy way to access and discover that content, today's digital living room experience is lost," said Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, in a statement. "By integrating Rovi's data as part of our Dragon TV platform, people will ultimately be able to lean back and speak to instantly find and discover the shows and content they want."

"Entertainment options will continue to grow. With it will be the complexity of finding and deciding what to watch. Consumers want easy to use and simple ways for discovering entertainment that doesn't require a remote control with as many keys as a keyboard. Voice brings this capability," said Corey Ferengul, executive vice president of product management and strategy at Rovi, in the statement. "Our relationship with Nuance further expands our ability to provide our customers—service providers and consumer electronics manufacturers—with an advanced media guide that redefines consumers' discovery and TV viewing experience."