According to Apple, Siri, the iPhone 4S’ virtual voice-based assistant, will gain support for additional languages in 2012. While international users are still waiting for Siri to support the creation of reminders, events, and messages in their preferred language — not to mention all the other functionalities that Apple enabled in the first “beta” of the assistant — it is still unclear if Siri will ever officially support a feature that has always seemed perfect for voice input and interactions: translations. iTranslate Voice, a new utility by Sonico Mobile, wants to fill this void with a Siri-like interface for an iPhone app powered by the same tech behind Apple’s solution: Nuance.

If Siri could do voice translations, I imagine they would look exactly like iTranslate Voice, as Sonico’s app borrows heavily from Siri in terms of overall interface design and style. Like Siri, iTranslate Voice displays ongoing voice interactions as conversations between you and the software; like Apple’s assistant, conversations are initiated by tapping on a circular, glowing microphone button that, however, in this app has been styled with flags. Conversations can be scrolled vertically, and tapping on single “bubbles” will you give you options to copy, share, or “speak” the words you dictated again. By tapping and holding the latest entry in a conversation, you can directly modify the words you said using the iPhone’s keyboard — this can be particularly useful to refine text input in case the app didn’t get some details right.

iTranslate uses Nuance’s speech recognition software to recognize and translate voices. iTranslate supports 31 languages, but only some of them support both voice recognition and text-to-speech. A complete list of supported languages (which also includes dictionary definitions, automatically displayed inline when available) is available on the developers’ website. Like Siri, iTranslate Voice requires an Internet connection to operate — something that, I presume, is related to some heavy server-side processing and sampling the app does in order to deliver high-quality and timely results without wasting the iPhone’s local storage.

In my tests, iTranslate Voice has been extremely accurate and reliable. I was surprised at first, but on second thought I realized that the fact that Nuance is delivering good translations in seconds as you talk to your phone shouldn’t really be a surprise at this point. I have tested the app with Italian-to-English translations (and vice versa), and the results have been more than decent — I actually think they are the best ones I have found on iOS to date, and this speaks clearly of Nuance’s strong position in the market. I don’t know if the developers are also enhancing Nuance’s results with their own engine of sorts, but the end result is what matters, and iTranslate Voice doesn’t disappoint here. The app recognized first names and terms like “ATM”, handled common expressions well, and it even understood spoken punctuation in Italian (“virgola” for comma, “punto interrogativo” for question mark, and so forth), adjusting the sentences and tone of software accordingly. Results are delivered in seconds both on WiFi and 3G, and the app also does a good job at detecting end of speech if you enable the option in the Settings.

I won’t judge Sonico’s decision to make iTranslate Voice look like Siri, but I will say that the system undoubtedly works, and makes it easy to speak to your phone to get instant, spoken translations. I can’t shake the feeling that this, like Siri, feels like the future of human-to-computer interactions being built right now, and regardless of whether Apple and Nuance will eventually bring this feature to Siri, iTranslate Voice is impressive and you can get it today.

iTranslate Voice is available on the App Store at $0.99.

Nuance today released a new product of the “Dragon” dictation family for OS X, called Dragon Express and available at $49.99 on the Mac App Store. Dragon Express lives in the OS X menubar and can be activated with a single click or keyboard shortcut, allowing users to open the utility and start talking into a Mac’s built-in or external USB microphone. Using Nuance’s speech recognition technology, Dragon Express will transcribe the spoken text into the app’s window, with options to forward the text to other apps, search it with Spotlight or Google, email it, copy it to the clipboard, or share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Nuance is positioning Dragon Express as a lightweight version of the popular Dragon Dictate, which has more features and comes at a higher price. Dragon Express should be an “introduction” to speech recognition for OS X customers, and the company has even posted a handy comparison chart to see the functionalities available in Express and Dictate.

Dragon Express works locally (it doesn’t require network connectivity) and according to Nuance it’s “easier to use” than the full-featured Dragon Dictate. From the press release:

Dragon Express is a great app for those who are new to speech recognition or who are looking for an easy-to-use dictation tool that allows them to use their voice instead of typing,” said Peter Mahoney, senior vice president and general manager, Dragon, Nuance. “For those looking for a more full-featured speech recognition program, we recommend Dragon Dictate, which provides the full capabilities of advanced speech recognition technology.

Those looking to try Nuance’s speech recognition technology and services for the first time might want to try Dragon Express, available at $49.99 on the Mac App Store. Nuance is also offering Dragon Express customers the opportunity to upgrade to Dragon Dictate for $99. Nuance isn’t new to Apple customers, offering a variety of iOS and OS X apps and also powering OS X Lion’s built-in voices.

Back in July Nuance released a new iOS app, Dragon Go!, that we described as combining “Nuance’s top-notch voice recognition with the intelligence to do what is actually being said”. It will listen to a question or statement you make and then using the number of services it supports (from Yelp to Twitter to the iPod app), complete the task that you invoked.

Today Nuance has released an update to Dragon Go! that, in a sense, upgrades its intelligence that we described. It has improved it’s intelligence by adding support for a number of new services – meaning it can now understand more commands and actually do more things. It has added support for media services Netflix and Spotify, search engines Wolfram|Alpha and Ask.com as well as Google+.

It has also improved the Yelp experience from within the app by allowing users to access a map from within the Yelp tab. You can grab the update now, or if you haven’t yet tried Dragon Go! you can download it for free on the App Store.

Nuance has today released an upgrade to their Mac-based dictation software, Dragon Dictation 2.5. The new version focuses on refining features and adding minor features that will make dictation tasks simpler. A big feature addition is support for dictation in Microsoft Word 2011, which also allows users to seamlessly mix typing and dictation. Also new is the ability to use the iPhone as an input microphone for Dragon Dictate using the Dragon Remote Microphone app that was recently released for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Also new are Facebook and Twitter commands which will allow users to easily post tweets or create a status update in Facebook by saying “Tweet [speak text]” and “Post to Facebook [speak] text” or a similar command. As Peter Mahoney of Nuance explains, they heard requests for “more flexibility” and responded with more formatting controls which allow users to have more control over how data such as dates are formatted and how abbreviations are used. Users can also delete entries from the Dragon dictionary if it conflicts with other words and there is now a dedicated numbers mode which only dictates numbers and commands – helpful for database entry.

The Dragon Dictate 2.5 update is free for all users of the Dragon Dictate 2.0 version, whilst new users can purchase the new version now for $179.99. Jump the break for Nuance’s full press release.

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Voice-powered search has become increasingly popular in recent years as more and more people purchase smartphones such as the iPhone or an Android device. Google has extensive voice-integration on Android and similarly has iOS Apps that include the ability to search by voice commands, others such as Microsoft with Bing, Nuance and Siri have done similar things. Furthering their previous efforts, Nuance yesterday released a new app, Dragon Go!, that combines Nuance’s top-notch voice recognition with the intelligence to do what is actually being said.

It plugs into various services from the typical Google Search to Pandora, Fandango, Wikipedia, Yelp, IMDB and many more – in fact at launch the app supports more than 180 options. Consequently saying, “What’s the weather like?” will pull data from AccuWeather, whereas saying “Super 8 showtimes” will direct you to Fandango.

Not only does Dragon Go! hear what people are searching for, but it understands what they want, giving them direct access to relevant results from 180 of the most trusted and reliable content providers, including AccuWeather, Bing, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, iTunes, Last.fm, LiveNation, Milo.com, OpenTable, Pandora ® internet radio, Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, YouTube, Yahoo! and many others – with the list of content providers growing each day

Dragon Go also integrates with the iPhone so that if you say “Play Coldplay” you can play music straight from your device, similarly it will integrate with the Phone app, the Maps app and more. This is now Nuance’s fourth iOS app, and it complements their Dragon Dictation app and the more tradition Dragon Search app. Earlier this year there had been a number of rumors that Apple was set to do a deal with Nuance to integrate a service similar to what this app offers, but at the base iOS level. Dragon Go! is available for free in the US App Store.

[Via AllThingsD]
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Noterize, which was a fairly popular note-taking app that had been featured by Apple in its Iconic ad, had mysteriously disappeared from the App Store a little while ago. TUAW is today reporting that the absence was because Noterize had been acquired by Nuance.

The Noterize app was particularly well known for its fairly innovative and intuitive annotation and markup features, which you can still view in their promotional video here. Perhaps the most obvious reason for this acquisition could be because Nuance is interesting in releasing their own note-taking app with similar annotation and markup features and have them complemented by voice recognition and dictation. Users could then create a note on a PDF and dictate the contents of the note rather than type it out.

This acquisition of Noterize comes after a number of news pieces over the past few weeks relating to talk over Apple doing a deal with Nuance to feature voice recognition and dictation in iOS 5. There was even the supposedly leaked screenshots of an internal iOS 5 build that showed settings that seemed to back up the rumors.

[Via TUAW]

With Nuance technology possibly sprinkled in iOS, why not show off with a brand new app that’s free in the App Store? Dragon Remote Microphone was announced by Nuance today as a sort of “wireless microphone” for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, Windows-only speech recognition software for the desktop. The best part is that all you need is a WiFi connection to the PC – you don’t need to crawl under your desk or visit staples to buy an accessory.

In conjunction with the launch of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11.5, Nuance introduced the Dragon Remote Mic App, a free application on the Apple iOS app store which makes it possible to use an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad as a wireless microphone for Dragon via a Wi-Fi network connection. Many customers have requested to use their smartphones and other mobile devices with Dragon to have more flexibility with how and where they dictate with Dragon. The new Dragon Remote Mic App takes advantage of the nearly 200 million iOS devices in use today, and transforms the device into a wireless microphone that easily captures dictation and controls applications on your PC.

Leading up to WWDC 2011, the Internet was lit with rumors about Apple possibly integrating Nuance technology into iOS 5. Later leaked screenshots reveal Nuance dictation to be embedded, which may offer speech-to-text input thanks to a microphone button on your keyboard (not dissimilar from Android). Remember when Apple acquired Siri? Much of Siri’s technology was based on Nuance – TechCrunch speculated that Apple may already be running Nuance’s translation software in the Apple data center. That deal was rumored to be dismissed, however, as a partnership would reduce costs, yet it’s unknown whether a partnership could reveal itself by the time iOS 5 is released in the fall. As Nuance continues to release apps on iOS, including the previously released Dragon Dictation for iPhone and iPad (free in the App Store), they convey that iOS seems to be a prime candidate future integration.

[Nuance via MacRumors]

The Chronic Wire got its hands on a build of iOS 5 running Apple internal settings and posted a series interesting screenshots throughout the day detailing some of the features that are enabled for Apple employees and developers for testing and troubleshooting, but aren’t visible in the beta build of iOS 5 seeded to developers on Monday. Among those screenshots, new ones posted a few minutes ago show what looks like Nuance voice recognition baked into the OS — in the weeks leading up to WWDC 2011, Nuance was in the middle of Internet speculation for a possible deal with Apple that would allow the company to tightly integrate Nuance’ voices and functionalities into iOS for text-to-speech, voice recognition, and more.

The screenshots show some options like “mic on space key”, “auto-record input” and “Nuance dictation”, which seem to suggest Apple has been testing ways to integrate additional buttons in the default iPhone keyboard to let users speak and have text transcribed on screen. Nuance indeed has an application for the iPhone called Dragon Dictation (our review here) that enables users to do just that in seconds. Nuance voices are also built-in in Mac OS X Lion as reported a few weeks ago.

The Chronic Wire is promising more screenshots from these internal settings and we’re certainly looking forward to more tidbits hidden inside iOS 5. No Nuance announcement or partnership was unveiled at WWDC, with new rumors now suggesting that everything could be unveiled in the Fall before the release of iOS and perhaps during the iPhone 5 keynote.

TechCrunch reports today a couple of interesting tidbits about the upcoming WWDC and the announcements Apple is expected to make at the developer event. First off, MG Siegler says the reports of Apple issuing invites to British and Australian press seen as “proof” of an iPhone 5 / iPhone 4S announcement are incorrect, as Apple clearly stated months ago that WWDC ’11 would be about software and the “future of iOS and Mac OS X.” As the iPhone PR team is handling these invites, TechCrunch notes the team is the same that covers major iOS announcements, which is obviously why Apple wants journalists at the WWDC keynote — to unveil iOS 5. As for the new features in the OS, MG Siegler quickly mentions iOS 5 will feature “completely revamped” notifications and widgets — two parts of iOS that were long rumored to be going under a complete rewrite at Cupertino. On another interesting note, he says Nuance’s voice-recognition technology (which Apple is rumored to implement with some licensing deals on iOS and OS X Lion) isn’t being used in the current internal version of Voice Control for iOS 5. Voice Control is a functionality that allows users to quickly call a contact or control music playback only using their voice.

The second bit of information we have heard is about iOS5 itself. First of all, while we’ve been leading the reports of Nuance technology being fully baked into iOS 5, one place we’ve heard it won’t be used (at least not yet) is Voice Control. That’s odd since it’s perhaps the most obvious usage. But apparently, in the builds of iOS 5 currently being tested, the little-used feature hasn’t changed at all, we hear.

That could obviously change before the release (which is still likely months away, even though it will be previewed at WWDC), but apparently the Nuance technology is meant for bigger things more core to the OS than that one feature.

The other big news for iOS5 — and yes, I’ve completely buried the lede here, thanks for reading! — two things: completely revamped notifications and widgets.

A series of fan-made concept videos in the past weeks showed how Apple could improve notifications, bring more powerful voice-recognition features and implement Lion-like Dashboard and home screen widgets, capturing the interest of Apple watchers and fans that have been looking forward to a better management of notifications and the possibility to turn some apps into widgets visible on the iPhone’s Home screen. Apple was also rumored to be considering an acquisition to improve the iOS notification system, though the report failed to provide additional details (many pointed to Boxcar as the ideal notification app for iOS) leading us to believe that Apple itself has rebuilt notifications from the ground-up for the new iOS. The WWDC kicks off in San Francisco on June 6, and Apple is expected to make a formal announcement about the keynote (and speaker) in the next days.