Nuance, the company that makes the speech recognition software that powers Apple’s Siri voice assistant and the Dragon line of text-to-speech tools, is about to become a Microsoft subsidiary. Microsoft has agreed to pay $19.7 billion to acquire Nuance in a deal expected to be finalized later in 2021. Does this mean Microsoft is investing […]
speech recognition
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Mozilla releases open source speech recognition tools
Digital assistants have taken off in the past few years, allowing you to speak to Siri on your iPhone, Alexa on your Echo speaker, Cortana on your PC, or Google Assistant on your Android phone. But all of those platforms have something in common: they use proprietary speech recognition techniques. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all […]
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Microsoft Dictate brings Cortana’s speech recognition to Office
The last few versions of Microsoft Windows have had built-in support for speech recognition, allowing you to control some PC functions with your voice and to dictate text for input in various applications. But the service isn’t as accurate as the speech engine that powers the Cortana voice assistant software included in Windows 10. So […]
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Amazon wants Echo’s Alexa Voice Service on third-party hardware
As promised, Amazon is taking steps to let anyone incorporate the voice assistant software used by the Amazon Echo into third-party hardware. This could let computers, TV boxes, smart speakers, or pretty much any device with a microphone, speaker, and internet connection respond to voice commands by using Amazon’s technology. Amazon has launched a developer […]
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Chrome is listening: Google adds Web Speech API to Chrome browser
If you have a computer or mobile device that supports speech input, you can talk into a microphone to enter text, initiate voice commands, or perform other actions. Now it’s a little easier to do the same thing when visiting websites using the Google Chrome web browser. Starting with Google Chrome 25 beta, Google’s web […]
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Talk to your browser: Google Chrome 11 beta adds support for speech input
Google has announced that the latest beta version of its Chrome web browser adds support for the HTML5 speech input API. That means developers can write web apps that will convert speech to text, allowing you to interact with a web page by speaking into your computer’s microphone. The technology could let you search a […]
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Asus working on voice controlled Eee products
The other day TechRadar scored an interview with Asus CEO Johnny Shih. He spilled the beans on that crazy folding laptop that Asus showed at CES this year (it  should be available this fall for $1000 to $1500). But it’s not a netbook, and honestly, I’m not sure the concept makes a whole lot of […]