Personalised entertainment experience specialist Rovi Corporation and voice and language solutions provider Nuance Communications have revealed a joint initiative to deliver an end-to-end solution for conversational entertainment discovery. Nuance and Rovi will provide a fully integrated conversational voice interface that ultimately delivers a personalised entertainment experience where people can speak naturally to quickly and easily find and access content. The Rovi deal marks Nuance’s second broadcast sector deal following its agreement with remote device specialist ruwido.

Nuance’s Dragon TV voice recognition, text-to-speech and voice biometrics will be integrated with Rovi’s cloud-based Conversation Services. Together, Nuance and Rovi will enable device manufacturers and service providers to offer reliable and highly scalable voice interfaces that result in fast and relevant search and recommendations. In addition, the combined offering lowers a customer’s total cost of ownership, accelerates voice services deployment, and delivers compelling user experiences.

“With so much content and so many channels to choose from, consumers want instantaneous and effortless access to their favourite video content,” said Scott Taylor, senior vice president of devices, Nuance Mobile. “Voice transforms the content discovery experience by getting people directly to the entertainment they want in just a few words. And by integrating our TV-optimised voice capabilities with Rovi’s natural language search and discovery, service providers will be able to deliver an even more personalised experience for consumers.”

Nuance’s Dragon TV gives service operators and OEMs the ability easily to integrate and deliver a seamless user experience that makes it faster and easier to find shows, programmes, and On-Demand content just by speaking. Leveraging both embedded and cloud-based technologies, Dragon TV can be deeply integrated right on a remote, TV or set top box – fully customisable across more than 40 languages.

“As digital content choices continue to proliferate across various platforms, media and entertainment services are becoming increasingly competitive, and providers are seeking to enrich their offerings with features that bring the most relevant entertainment content straight to viewers,” said Michael Hawkey, senior vice president and general manager of discovery, Rovi. “Rovi’s initiative with Nuance is another step forward in driving innovation in entertainment discovery based on voice and natural conversation. Our integrated approach enables providers to quickly deploy advanced services that will further enhance a user’s entertainment experiences.”

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