Garmin's nuvi 880 gets great recognition!

 

 The Garmin nuvi 880, the first navigation unit with full bragging rights to great speech recognition has garnered some glowing reviews from various websites.

 

 One particular review by PC Magazine's Craig Ellison gives some detailed results from a former Dragon speech recognition user, and all in all, our hats are off to a great product with real speech recognition!

 

Pioneer's LINC releases, with "intent" recognition

 

 Pioneer's Mobile Entertainment Division (Long Beach, Ca.) is releasing the promised AVIC-F500BT LINC (Lifestyle Innovation Network Console), a portable navigation and speech recognition unit.

The LINC's main function: An in-dash GPS device with 1.2 million points of interest, an SD slot and it uses MSN for traffic, weather and gas price updates.

What's cool is the device incorporates Pioneer's "VoiceBox Conversational Voice Search Platform," a nicely developed speech recognition system that enables iPod or other MP3 players and voice control for you Bluetooth-connected phone.

 VoiceBox's innovation is it's extraction algorihm that allow what Pioneer terms "conversational commands" and "intent recognition", and very advanced noise-canceling that deals quite well with ambient vehicle noise and the presence of extra voices.

The conversational element is its ability to deduce various forms of basic commands. "I want to hear the artist Herbie Hancock" or "Play Herbie Hancock" will produce the same result.
(** The LINC offers iPod-specific playback recognitions such as album name, playlist name or music genre.)

 Pioneer's "conversational recognition" spreads it's wings with the ability to extract a relevant phrase from a inside a long utterance, that contains irrelevant words: "Uhh, play, hmm, let's see, that album Abbey Road". The unit has the capacity to ignore extra words it decides are superflous.

 Pioneer's "Intent Recognition" is a artificial intelligence that reponds at a higher level to enhance the user's interactive abilities. With typical command & control, pre-defined, specific commands like "Call Phil Donnahue at home" or "Call Georg Bush on the mobile phone" are prerequisite. Pioneer's AI prompts for additional information, if it appears necessary for a positive recognition; E.G. "I have 2 numbers for James Caan - Home and Mobile. Which one would you like to call?"

 An excellenc cnet.com video from CES 2008, of the LINC can be seen here.

 

Navigation, solely w/ remote speech recognition!

 

NavStar Technologies, in partnership with Navteq, a provider of digital maps for vehicle navigation, has released "Voice Navigator" - an entirely speech recognition driven navigation device accessing only a remote server!

True, wireless remote speech recognition... via NavStar:
"No PC's, CD's, DVD's, tiny screens, difficult interfaces, or piles of 'stuff' to learn. Simply plug it in and start using it."

According to NavStar, there is even "planning intelligence" built in:
Users can plan their trip ahead of time, store it and then access the planned route with the push of a button.

The device interfaces with user's mobile devices, using their wireless broadband service. Navteq's "Points of Interest" database includes over six million listings including airports, restaurants, hotels, banks, gas stations and other popular destinations, or, subscribers can state the exact address desired.

Our techie hats are off to this wonderful advance in true wireless remote speech recognition!