Nuance demos two cool new things: Voice recognition for everything and Swype for smartwatches
Omate's smartwatch will include Nuance's Dragon Mobile Assistant for voice-based controls — CES 2014 … If there's one company well positioned to benefit from the rise of wearable technology, it's Nuance.
Context & Ripple Effects
Nuance comes to CES 2014 after three years of assembling its voice stack piece by piece: the Dragon Go app that routed searches by intent in 2011, the Expect Labs partnership on predictive computing in late 2012, and the $100-million-plus Swype acquisition in October 2011. The two CES demos — broad voice recognition and a Swype keyboard shrunk to wrist scale — are the first time that assembled portfolio has been pointed explicitly at wearables.
The story travelled unusually wide for a booth demo: pickups at Engadget, ZDNet, PC Magazine, Droid Life and TechHove-era gadget press all ran it the same day, which reflects how contested the smartwatch input question already was in January 2014. With Omate confirmed to ship Dragon Mobile Assistant on its watch, Nuance is positioning itself as the default interface supplier for a device category still picking its form factor.
First-order effects
- Omate's smartwatch ships with Dragon Mobile Assistant built in, converting Nuance from an app vendor phone users opt into into a preinstalled component supplier at the device level.
- The smartwatch-sized Swype demo gives wearable makers a text-entry option alongside dictation, letting Nuance sell both halves of the small-screen input problem from one catalog.
Second-order effects
- With AT&T having opened its Watson speech API to outside developers in 2012, Nuance's wearable push pressures rival speech platforms to lock up embedded device deals before smartwatch defaults harden.
- Small wearable OEMs without in-house assistant teams now face a licensing market Nuance is defining early, trading margin for time-to-market on their first-generation watches.
Third-order effects
- If voice and trace input become the standard control layer on screens too small for keyboards, value in the wearable supply chain migrates from hardware assembly toward whoever licenses the speech software — the position Nuance spent 2011–2013 buying into.
- A category defined by licensed assistants rather than owned ones makes assistant choice a competitive differentiator between watch brands, the same dynamic that shaped smartphone search defaults.
The trend: Interface software is following hardware form factors downward: as screens shrink past comfortable typing, per-device licensing of voice and gesture input is becoming the default way smartwatches get usable.