Google has reportedly been hard at work developing glasses with a built-in heads-up display (HUD) on one lens. The glasses reportedly look very similar to Oakley’s Thump sunglasses, which allowed users to load songs onto a small flash drive and listen to tunes through integrated ear buds. According to 9to5Google, the glasses will be equipped with “hardware near the equivalent of a generation-old Android smartphone,” which means we’ll likely see a 1GHz processor and internal storage in ...

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...

Google on Tuesday announced that calls placed within the United States and Canada using Google Voice will continue to be free through the end of 2012. “This is our way of helping you connect with friends and family across the country,” Group Product Manager Vincent Paquet wrote on a company blog. Google stated last year that calls made within the U.S. and Canada would be free through 2011, but the company is extending the promotion through 2012 for reasons unknown. Google Voice was born from Goog...

Amazon recently quietly purchased Yap, a Charlotte-based company that specializes in voice-to-text technology. CLTBlog, a Charlotte-focused website, discovered a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that doesn’t actually name Amazon as the purchaser of Yap, but it does attribute the acquisition to a company called “Dion Acquisition Sub,” and the “Surviving Corporation” listed by the SEC has the same address as an Amazon.com office located on 410 Terry ...

As also-ran media tablets continue to launch in rapid succession, Sprint says slates are missing a key ingredient needed before consumers will bite: voice. Sprint’s director of business product marketing Jeff Adelmann believes that before tablets can be widely adopted, they need cellular connectivity and telephony capabilities that are far more deeply integrated than current third-party solutions. “When [tablets] become a communication device, then you want ubiquitous connectivity, and Wi-Fi can...

A new wireless carrier named Republic Wireless, a part of Bandwidth.com, will begin to offer unlimited voice, text and data plans on November 8th for just $19 per month. How is that possible? Republic Wireless will route calls and text messages over Wi-Fi networks when available, and when you’re outside of one it will send the calls over a standard cell network. According to GigaOm, Republic Wireless will buy minutes in bulk from Sprint and then resell them to its customers. The carrier will offer speci...

Google updated its Translate application for Android devices on Thursday with support for 11 additional languages as part of a major update. The application will now translate and speak English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish. Google originally launched the conversation feature of Google Translate in January of this year and subsequently added support for Japanese in the wake of the country’s earthquak...

Apple’s Siri and Nuance-powered “Assistant” voice control feature expected to launch with iOS 5 has hardly been a secret, and now MacRumors has commissioned a video mock-up of the service based on what we know so far. The video shows, for example, that a user might be able to hold down the home button to activate the application and speak a command, not unlike Apple’s simple voice controls today. Assistant should step today’s capabilities up quite a bit, however. The service will...

In an effort to edge in on MetroPCS and Sprint-owned Boost and Virgin Mobile, Verizon Wireless will introduce a brand new $50 monthly prepaid this week that includes unlimited text, talk and web, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. The new plan, which first launched back in April as “Unleashed” in limited markets, will be available to customers in Verizon stores, Walmart, Target and Best Buy. The new plan is much cheaper than Verizon’s current unlimited talk and text prepaid option,...

Google has started to build its open-source WebRTC software into its Chrome web browser, according to CNET. WebRTC was introduced in May as a new open tech that allows developers to create quick HTML and Javascript APIs for building voice and video chat applications on the web. With WebRTC built into Chrome, users would presumably be able to initiate video chats over Gmail’s Google Talk chat application without the need for installing Google’s plug-in first. “Our goal is to enable Chrome wit...

Google on Tuesday unveiled several tweaks to its core search product, including the ability to search by voice or image. Image-based searching has been around for quite a while now, but Google intends to popularize the alternative search method by supporting it right from within the main Google Images search engine. Users can initiate searches using images hosted on the Web, or they can upload images from a PC to start a search. Searches initiated by a photo will return both text and image-based results. The ...

Citing a source claimed to be reliable, tech blogger Robert Scoble says enhanced voice commands will be included in iOS 5 when it launches this fall. Apple acquired Siri last year, presumably with the intention of enhancing the lackluster voice command support found in iOS. It has been rumored for quite some time that Apple would be making enhanced voice commands a major part of iOS 5, but Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote came and went with no mention of voice commands. Scoble claims that his source — one who...

It looks as though Google may be testing a voice search feature for its desktop search homepage. According to blog Search Engine Roundtable, several users have begun seeing the oh-so-familiar microphone icon in the search box on google.com — we can confirm that we have seen it on our Google home page as well. The icon will look extremely familiar to those Android users out there, as voice search has been an operating system staple for nearly a year now. No word on when/if this feature will roll out to the m...

Motorola has announced that there is a new software update available for the Verizon Wireless DROID Pro. Unfortunately the patch will not update your DROID Pro to Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), but it should reduce the frequency of UI lockups, offer improved audio during calls, and the following fixes:Improved audio on voice calls.Improved stability and performance.User interface display now refreshes when user switches from GSM/UMTS communication to Global Mode.Device now prepends 011 to Country Code to send SMS...