CES 2012: Metadata Meet Voice Recognition - Gracenote and Nuance Cut Ten Year Deal

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Published on Friday, 13 January 2012 10:42

Nuance Communications and Gracenote have announced a ten-year strategic partnership to accelerate voice innovations and next-generation solutions for interactive music and video experiences on phones, in cars, on smart TVs, and in the cloud -- all across a broad range of content providers. The partnership brings together the leading innovators for voice and digital media metadata respectively, whose technologies today are used by the biggest names in the mobile, consumer electronics and automotive industries.

Nuance’s leading voice and natural language understanding technologies will leverage Gracenote’s MediaVOCS database of phonetic transcriptions of artist names, albums and music genres, as well as movie and TV metadata. The combined technologies will be made available as one solution via Nuance later this year – VoCon Music Premium. VoCon Music Premium will deliver an unmatched voice experience where consumers can simply speak the name of almost any artist, song, or album, and instantly get results – even for the most difficult artist names for systems to recognize, such as Ke$ha, AC/DC and 311.

“Never before has there been a greater consumer demand for constant and unlimited access to content – be it music, videos or the web. But that unlimited access must be fast, easy and simple,” said Michael Thompson, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Nuance Mobile. “By combining our voice and natural language understanding innovations with Gracenote’s leading phonetic data and metadata, Nuance will bring to market an entirely new media-specific platform for cars, phones, TVs, and mobile apps, giving consumers an amazing media experience anywhere they access content.”

Nuance and Gracenote will also focus their partnership on developing compelling next-generation media experiences that take advantage of the vast media resources and content available to consumers – specifically content in the cloud. Nuance and Gracenote will collaborate to bring voice technologies to market that drive effortless media discovery and navigation of media libraries containing millions of songs, movies, shows, and artist and actor content. Ultimately, OEMs and electronics manufacturers will have more flexibility in differentiating their music and video offerings, while providing consumers with the fastest and easiest ways to find and experience the media they want, when they want it – no matter where they are or what they are doing.