NASDAQ listed Speech and Imaging solutions company Nuance Communications is launching a voice recognition service with two operators in India, reports Mint. The service will be used to power song search. Sumit Goswami, Head of Marketing (India/Asean regions) at Nuance told MediaNama that the service being launched is free-flow voice-based search. In case of a free-flow search, the product returns a result based on an entire sentence spoken instead of a specific keyword. Voice is first converted into text, a database is queried, and a result is provided to the user. In our opinion, all voice based search will eventually have to be free-flow, and voice to text is especially important in India, given the dominance of voice based services, and the fact that text based services will have a limited role in rural India. Even for voice based services, the dialects will be difficult to understand, and the dictionary powering the voice-to-text service will learn with more usage. At present, the product, Nuance Recognizer does voice-to-text search for 11 languages - Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Oriya, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi and Indian English; two other languages are still under development. The product can be deployed for both song search and directory search, though it has been deployed previously in India for speech recognition for contact centres in the BFSI segment. Nuance is going live directly with the telecom operators. Nuance expects the service to be live October or November 2009 - latest by the first quarter of 2010. The deployment will cover 70 percent…
