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 the 8GB to 16GB range. The glasses will also be capable of voice input and output according to the report, and they will be able to capture photos using a front-facing camera. A user may even be able to navigate through menu items by tilting his or her head, 9to5Google said. The pilot program for Google’s HUD glasses is expected to launch soon but the devices are reportedly still far from ready for a mass roll out.

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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 Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services,” Mike Thompson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, of Nuance Mobile said. “By acquiring Vlingo, we are able to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet this demand.” The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Nuance’s full press release follows after the break.

Nuance to acquire Vlingo

Burlington, Mass. – December 20, 2011 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Vlingo, Inc. Fueled by unprecedented demand for intelligent voice interfaces that combine voice, language understanding and semantic processing, Nuance and Vlingo will combine their deep innovation and R&D expertise to deliver next-generation natural language interfaces across numerous markets and industries.

Consumer interest and demand for virtual assistant and voice-enabled capabilities have exploded in recent months, creating a $5 billion market opportunity that spans phones, tablets, cars, televisions, navigation devices, music players, PCs and more. Both Nuance and Vlingo see an unprecedented appetite for intelligent devices that understand the spoken word and deliver outcomes for consumers and professionals.

“Inspired by the introduction of services such as Apple’s Siri and our own Dragon Go!, virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet is looking for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services,” said Mike Thompson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Nuance Mobile.  “By acquiring Vlingo, we are able to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet this demand.”

“Vlingo and Nuance have long shared a similar vision for the power and global proliferation of mobile voice and language understanding. As a result of our complementary research and development efforts, our companies are stronger together than alone. Our combined resources afford us the opportunity to better compete, and offer a powerful proposition to customers, partners and developers,” said Dave Grannan, CEO, Vlingo.

By harnessing the combined expertise in voice, language and multilingual capabilities, Nuance will be able to take advantage of the adoption of intelligent mobile assistants, where consumers, businesses, doctors and patients can engage in more human, natural interactions with devices and systems all over the world.

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 Google’s acquisition of GrandCentral in 2007, and the later acquisition of Gizmo5 in 2009 is expected to eventually add VoIP capabilities to the service. For the time being, VoIP calling is only supported from within Gmail.

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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 Avenue in Seattle, Washington. Read on for more.

According to Yap’s website, it appears the company’s voicemail service was shut down during October of this year, a month after the SEC documents say the purchase was completed. It appears likely that Amazon will use Yap’s voice recognition technology to compete directly with Apple’s virtual personal assistant, Siri. The online retailer will soon release its first Android tablet, the Kindle Fire, and rumors dating back as far as May have suggested the company may be working on an entire family of devices, including smartphones.

Yap, like Siri, could be a valuable addition to Amazon’s tablets and also to a possible smartphone offering the retailer has been rumored to be developing. Neither Amazon nor Yap have confirmed the purchase.

[Via The Atlantic]

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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’t provide that,” Adlemann said during a recent Open Mobile Summit session. Read on for more.

The executive said tablets should feature better integration with smartphones, allowing owners to make and receive voice calls on a tablet while connected wirelessly to a phone. Adlemann doesn’t think such functionality will draw consumers away from Apple’s iPad, Light Reading Mobile reported, but he does believe integrated voice will help create a more appealing package that will drive sales in general.

“There’s no one silver bullet; we could fix one thing and not see the needle move,” Adelmann said. “But, tablets today are primarily companion devices. If you have multiple devices, you want to use services across them.”

Sprint currently offers five tablet models including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the HTC EVO View 4G. Adlemann’s comments could be construed as an indication that none of its current models have been flying off store shelves.

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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 special Android phones with support for voice calling over Wi-Fi networks using technology similar to UMA, a feature in several of T-Mobile’s Android and BlackBerry devices. Reportedly, Republic Wireless will also offer unlimited 3G without any data caps.

[Via GigaOm]

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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 earthquake and tsunami crisis. Users can speak words and then correct them, if there was an error, before the phone speaks them in the translated language. The text translation aspect of Google Translate offers support for 63 different languages. A video of the application in action follows after the break. 

Thanks, Grizzly

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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 likely scour your phone’s contents or the web to deliver results, and it may even be capable of replying to you; in the MacRumors video, Assistant asks the user if he would like to text a contact’s mobile or work number. We expect to hear more about Assistant during Apple’s iPhone event on October 4th. Read on for the full video.

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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, which currently costs $94.99 per month. “This is a very competitive market, and we want to make sure we have a price portfolio to fit a greater number of customers,” Verizon Wireless spokeswoman Brenda Raney said. “In these times there are some people who would prefer living on a prepaid plan.” Read on for more.

Here’s what Verizon’s competitors charge: AT&T’s GoPhone service offers the same unlimited options and costs $50 per month. Virgin Mobile’s service costs $55 per month although there are cheaper options for customers who want fewer minutes. MetroPCS offers a nationwide unlimited plan for $45 per month but customers can also opt for more expensive 4G prepaid packages. Boost Mobile’s service costs $50 per month but can drop as low as $35 per month as part of its “monthly shrinkage” perk for making on-time payments.

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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 with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs,” Henrik Andreasson, a Google employee on the WebRTC project said. “We are working hard to provide full RTC support in Chrome all the way from WebKit down to the native audio and video parts.”

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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 second major feature announced on Tuesday might have slightly less utility among the majority of users — voice search for Google’s desktop site. The service works just like Google’s mobile voice-based search service, but it is integrated with the company’s desktop search engine. We’re not sure what benefit voice-based desktop searches provide for the typical user, but the feature is live and ready to try in the latest version of Google’s Chrome browser. Hit the break for videos highlighting Google’s new voice and image-based search services.

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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 spoke accurately of the deep Twitter integration Apple showed off on Monday weeks ahead of WWDC — said Apple’s voice command integration wasn’t ready to show off at the show. The feature will be a part of iOS 5, however, and will perhaps be unveiled this fall when Apple is expected to announce its next-generation iPhone.

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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 masses.

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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 messages.

Global Mode no longer resets when connecting to a USB charger.

Visual Voice Mail now detects airplane mode while Wi-Fi is active.

Prompt return to full screen brightness after wake-up.

Upgraded Bluetooth firmware.

Improved interoperability with Microsoft Internet Application Gateway (IAG) configurations.

Device string format for Exchange changed to include device name and version number.

Upgrade to Google applications Release 7

For more information on the software update, hit up Verizon Wireless’ support forums located at www.verizonwireless.com/droidprosupport.

[Via Mobile Burn]

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Intel gathered by blog Android Central indicates that Sprint and Google will make their Google Voice partnership ready for prime time on April 26th. The venture, which was announced last month, will allow Sprint customers to seamlessly integrate their current wireless number with Google’s Voice service. Calls and texts sent from your mobile device will be logged by Google Voice’s online system, and calls can be made from the browser using the service’s VoIP feature. International calls made from linked mobile devices will automatically route through Google Voice — which offers deep discounting on international voice traffic. The feature has been available in beta for the last few weeks, but it looks like the two companies are finally ready to let everyone in on the fun.

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