Apple looks to boost Siri's speech recognition with Novauris acquisition

With the competition scrambling to get in on the intelligent personal assistant game, Apple is looking to add some speech recognition props to Siri's already expansive skillset. Apple purchased eminent automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology company Novauris Technologies which was a subsidiary of Dragon Systems, a well known voice and dictation technology pioneer behind DragonDictate and Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

According to Techcrunch, the acquisition, "apparently took place last year, but had not been announced. At Apple as of last fall, the team is now working on improving Siri, the speech-based virtual assistant technology that comes pre-installed on Apple’s mobile devices."

Novauris's technology spans both device and server-side as well as cloud solutions for automatic speech recognition and it will be interesting to see how this technology matures and makes it to Apple's products.

Source: TechCrunch

Nuance releases PaperPort Notes for the iPad with Dragon Dictation

The beauty of Apple's iPad is that because it has such a solid developer community, we are only now starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with the device. Take for example PaperPort Notes which is a note-taking app that allows people to combine documents, web content, audio, typed text, handwritten notes – and now dictated notes – into a single document that can be easily organized and shared with anyone.

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