Nuance announced on Tuesday that it plans to acquire Vlingo, a voice-to-text and voice recognition technology firm that was once the subject of a Nuance lawsuit. Nuance senior manager Mike Thompson said the decision was made after his company realized there’s a $5 billion market opportunity as demand increases for voice engine products such as Apple’s Siri voice engine, which is powered in part by Nuance technology. “Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dr...

As rumored, Apple just took the wraps off the fruits of its Siri acquisition and it’s called… “Siri.” The feature enables you to interact with your device much as you would with a human assistant; you can speak to your phone naturally and it will perform as a personal assistant. Apple demonstrated different voice tasks during its press conference on Tuesday, such as asking what the weather is like today, or do I need a raincoat today? More voice tasks? Wake me up at 6AM tomorrow and Si...

We’ve heard rumors that Apple will a include Siri-powered “Assistant” voice command option ahead of the official iOS 5 launch, and now 9to5Mac has learned that Apple will also add Nuance-powered speech-to-text functionality. As the screenshots show, users will simply need to tap the microphone button next to the space bar in order to activate the feature. When active, a larger microphone image will pop up to alert the user to begin speaking. The functionality is similar to what’s alrea...

Nuance has just released an updated version of its free Dragon Dictation application for the iPhone and iPad that brings typeless social networking to the iPhone OS and iOS-using masses. In addition to the previous SMS and email support, Dragon Dictation 2.0 now allows you to post to twitter or update your status on Facebook merely by speaking to your mobile device. The latest version also pastes your dictated text directly into the device’s clipboard and can auto-save text when a phone call interrupts ...

Burlington, Mass-based company, Nuance, is bringing its duo of popular speech recognition software to customers in the UK. Nuance’s popular Dragon Search and Dragon Dictation have been submitted to Apple’s App Store and are awaiting approval for distribution in the UK. Both titles are currently available for free in the US and boast of combined downloads that approach 37 million. Dragon Search gives Android’s voice-to-text search a run for its money by providing  iPhone owners with the abil...

Google announced on Tuesday a new iPhone application that allows you to make location based searches just by speaking a question into your iPhone. Your spoken question, “Where is the nearest Best Buy?” for example, is sent to Google’s server as a digital file and processed by Google’s server side voice recognition software. The converted query is then forwarded to Google’s search engine and the results are sent back to the handset, supposedly within seconds. Excellent! This is no...

Nuance, the company behind Dragon Naturally Speaking, is developing a new mobile product called Open Voice Search. Similar to Vlingo and Microsoft’s TellMe, Open Voice Search allows users to interact with their phone through voice commands. This isn’t the archaic “Say a Command” voice commands that we know and love. In one application of the technology, Open Voice Search allows users to search the Internet by speaking into their phone. The Open Voice Search program transmits the spoken...