India soon to have Cars with speech recognition technology

Mumbai, Nov 10 (UNI) The day is not too far away when Cars made in India can be commanded through speech for navigation aids or mobile telephony purposes to make driving more safe.

The technology, which is already in vogue in the Western world, is all set to make a foray into the country with Nuance, a US based company which had come out with speech recognition solutions, offering the technology to Indian auto makers.

Fiat, which introcued the technology in its latest small car version Fiat 500, already has some bookings in India. However, whether the system would work to Indian way of speaking English is a challenge to overcome, Mr Arnd Well, General Mnager of Automotive Business unit of Nuance told newsmen here today.

Nuance, which already has a presence in India with a 55 member strong team including 35 in its R and D centre in Bangalore besides a subsidiary BPO, offers in enterprise space speech recognition solutions in contact centres.

Nuance holds 97 per cent share in speech solution market for Indian mobile services. In addition, Nuance mobile search and consumer business provide a host of innovative solutions to Indian consumers including voice activated dialing, automotive and personal navigation service, speech enabled guidance for the visually challenged and smart keypad solutions.

Mr Well said many applications embedded in today's cars or mobile devices required high quality voice prompts with audio feedback, allowing the user to concentrate on the task at hand--whether driving on a highway, navigating through congested streets or running through a crowd to catch train. Nuance offered solution through its latest PromptSculptor v 3.0, a powerful and very flexible tex to speech tuning tool.

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