Nuance Releases Another iOS App, Dragon Go! with Intelligent Voice Search

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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Adobe Releases Flash 11 And Air 3 Betas

Adobe yesterday made betas builds available for Flash 11 and Air 3, which tout some fairly significant improvements and feature additions. Perhaps the most interesting is the inclusion of Stage3D APIs (codenamed “Molehill”) which are a set of low-level, GPU accelerated 3D APIs that can enable high performance rendering of advanced 3D scenes. Adobe, in conjunction with Frima Studios has put together a demo of what this can achieve – we’ve embedded it past the break.

The inclusion of native support for 64-bit operating systems and browsers is also welcome news for performance and works on Windows, Mac and Linux in the new versions of Flash and Air. The last point of note is the inclusion of H.264/AVC software encoding for cameras, this will allow higher quality real-time communications from within Flash player.

Jump the break for that demonstration video of Stage3D as well as a full list of improvements in Flash 11 and Air 3. You can download the beta builds of Flash 11 here and Adobe Air 3 here.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

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Spotify Launching Today In The US, iPhone App Available In US App Store

Popular music streaming service Spotify, after much speculation and rumors, is launching today in the United States with an invite-system (for those who signed up last week) and subscriptions to access the various functionalities offered by the European company. Unlike the iTunes Store, or Amazon’s MP3 Store, Spotify allows you to stream a catalog of songs you don’t own, and in spite of the latest version introducing a purchase option, the focus of the service clearly is on streaming, rather than downloading. You can create playlists online, share them with your friends, mark songs as favorite, and browse the latest releases from Spotify, which thanks to support of major music labels happen to be the same of other marketplaces like iTunes. Spotify runs on a variety of platforms including the Mac, and you can read more about the desktop client’s features in our previous coverage.

Whilst Spotify has announced that the service will be open for business today in the US starting at 8 AM ET, the iPhone app, previously available exclusively in some European countries, is now available in the US App Store as well. The app is free, it’s got no iPad counterpart yet, but it lets you stream all the songs you have in your Spotify library, provided you subscribe to Premium plan ($9.99 per month) that gives you access to ad-free music with offline caching capabilities and mobile app support. Read more

App Store Volume Purchasing Program Coming To Businesses Soon

In an email to developers, Apple has revealed that it is implementing an App Store Volume Purchasing Program (ASVPP) for Businesses, following a similar system that has existed for educational institutions. This system, which Apple claims is “coming soon” will vastly simplify the process in which businesses can offer their employees the apps they need. The program will initially be US-only and will require a valid Dun & Bradstreet Number (D-U-N-S) and a valid physical address.

Once enrolled, the ASVPP can be accessed from the Apple website. This website is where businesses can purchase their apps in volume. The following screenshots highlight the process of doing so, which includes: searching for the app, setting the quantity and completing the transaction with either a corporate credit card, PCard or PayPal.

All volume purchases will result in an email from Apple and they are then added to a particular institutions purchase history which is located on the ASVPP website. Once purchased, an institution gets a redemption code for each app.

The program website delivers these redemption codes in a spreadsheet format that contains multiple codes, one for each app in the quantity purchased. Each time a code is redeemed, the spreadsheet is updated on the program website so you can track the number of codes that have been redeemed by your users.

Apple offers three ways in which institutions can quickly and easily distribute the app to their employees/users. The first is just a simple redemption URL which includes redemption code so that users do need to manually enter it into iTunes. Secondly they suggest posting the codes or URLs to a company portal or intranet page. The third option is to use a “third-party Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution” which offers an easily manageable system of centrally managing and distributing the apps.

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Apple Updates Prices Of International iTunes Stores

As we reported earlier today, the downtime of the iTunes Store last night and iTunes Connect today seems to be bringing along some interesting price changes for apps and other material available in the iTunes Store worldwide. Whilst we’re still examining the changes (which are rolling out as we speak), we’re getting the first reports of increased prices in the UK for apps (from £0.59 to £0.69 for apps sold at $0.99 in the United States) and lower prices in the Australian iTunes Store. The change for UK customers is a rather important one, raising prices for “cheap apps” – it’ll be interesting to notice how this will affect sales, as writer Craig Grannel points out.

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Apple Releases Aperture 3.1.3 Update

Released a few minutes ago on Apple’s Software Update and Downloads website, Aperture 3.1.3 is slowly rolling out to users with several bug fixes, minor enhancements, and performance improvements. Among the list of changes, Apple has improved support for gestures with a new checkbox in the Preferences to enable or disable them, and fixed an issue that caused Aperture to crash when trimming audio in full-screen mode. Various fixes all around should make the app more stable and reliable ahead of Lion’s release, rumored to be scheduled for tomorrow.

Full changelog below:

  • Improves reliability and performance when syncing web-published albums
  • Slideshow exports are now handled as a background operation
  • Crop tool now correctly supports use of gestures to define crop size
  • Gesture support can now be enabled or disabled in Preferences
  • Fixes an issue that could cause a blank sheet to display when placing a book or print order
  • Published MobileMe, Facebook and Flickr albums now appear in a Web section in the Projects Inspector
  • Shift-clicking snapshots on the Faces corkboard now allows you to make contiguous selections
  • Metadata presets are now correctly applied to imported audio files
  • Fixes an issue that could cause Aperture to quit unexpectedly when trimming audio in full screen mode
  • Resolves various issues when adding names to Faces using accented, Japanese, Korean or Simplified Chinese characters
  • Improves stability when browsing video clips
  • Addresses reliability of library repair and rebuild

Unlike with the latest iLife ‘11 updates, the new version of Aperture appears to be available only through Software Update and Apple’s website for now. The Mac App Store, in fact, at the moment of writing this still reports version 3.1.2 as the latest one available. Full release notes after the break.
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Review: Play by AOL Aggregates Music, Lets You Share & Discover

Play by AOL, the latest contendant in the social music discovery and sharing space, aims at providing a streamlined solution to what could be considered a common problem among iPhone and Android users: there is no unified system to share what you’re listening to and discover new music through the songs and albums your friends are liking. Ping by Apple failed at offering a solution truly meant for mobile with quick, instant access by being nothing but a mere social layer on top of the iTunes Store; on the other hand, apps like NowPlayer could be regarded as social attempts to get the music out of your device and onto the Internet (e.g. where your friends are), yet there’s always the issue with people finding tweets about #nowplaying annoying and, most of the times, out of context. Imagine if I tweeted all day about the music I’m listening to. That wouldn’t work. So that’s why in the past months we’ve seen the rise of SoundTracking (our review), a clever utility and social network by itself that lets you quickly share what’s playing on your device and send it off to an Instagram-like stream made by people you decided to follow within the app itself. Soundtracking can send items to Twitter and Facebook, but you don’t have to, as the app can live as a network on its own. Furthermore, sharing is made simple by a button that integrates with the iOS Music app to grab what’s playing in seconds, artist’s info and album artwork included. Read more

iTunes Connect Maintenance Could Mean Apple Is Eventually Recalibrating International iTunes Prices

We reported earlier today on news that Apple is preparing to undertake maintenance work on iTunes Connect today from 9am to 4pm PDT. Although we cannot confirm anything, we think there is (strong) reason to believe that this maintenance is being undertaken to rebalance iTunes prices internationally which over the past year have (to be quite honest) spiralled out of control. The above diagram illustrates this fact quite clearly and it also exists for Apps and other iTunes content. Yes, that’s right, there is an 81% surcharge for an Australian buying the same song as an American and those in Switzerland have to pay more than double at a 105% surcharge.

My thinking of this occurring started last Friday when Australian politician, Ed Husic, tweeted that Apple will “be getting back to me in mid July” regarding issues he had raised about (Australian) Apple pricing in Federal Parliament back in March. Now whilst he did (mostly) focus on hardware disparities in his speech, I still felt (on Friday) that Apple’s response could be about “re-calibrating” the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ - mostly because the Australian dollar has been sitting around US$1.03 whereas the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ expects it to average at US$0.60.

Fast-forward to today’s news that iTunes Connect is facing maintenance. If you read the notice, it makes it clear that something is happening to the price mechanism, as the letter reads: “pricing changes made between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. PDT will cause the app to become unavailable for purchase until maintenance is complete”.

Whilst that alone doesn’t suggest much, the fact that the notice explicitly mentions that customers may not be able to purchase content from iTunes if in Mexico, U.K., Australia, Switzerland, Japan or Norway really stood out to me. Because (with the exception of Mexico), those mentioned are (mostly) the worst affected regions of the iTunes price disparity - just look at the above or below graphs. Whilst Mexico is the opposite, they have actually been able to purchase content at cheaper than US customers.

To be absolutely clear, I re-iterate that we have no inside knowledge that this is the definite reason for the maintenance today. But the dots (if you will) just all connect: disparity has gotten ridiculous, Ed Husic’s tweet, it being mid-July, the affected portions of iTunes Connect and the regions affected. Nonetheless if by the end of today there isn’t a change, I think it’s still safe to say that Apple will inevitably act and I think that will be sooner than later.

You can read more about this global iTunes price disparity in this article we published in January.