AT&T and Vlingo have entered a licensing agreement and strategic alliance to incorporate AT&T’s Watson technology into Vlingo’s speech-enabled applications. The alliance will allow people to use their voice to create and send a text message or email, search the web,and access social networking tools, making data services more accessible and convenient to use. As part of the alliance, AT&T will take a minority equity stake in Vlingo.
AT&T said that its Watson speech recognition technology includes a set of tools for custom development and adaptation of acoustic and language models. In addition to Watson, its suite of speech technologies also includes Natural Voices, a text-to-speech product that converts text into voice for a wide variety of applications.
Charles Kalmanek, vice president of networking and services research of AT&T Labs, said: “AT&T’s Watson technology provides a world-class speech recognition engine in both performance and features. By allowing users to speak naturally, Watson opens the door to a wide range of innovative new services that are easy and natural to use.”
Vlingo offers mobile data applications with speech recognition technology. Its current applications are available for iPhone, Blackberry and Nokia phones.
Dave Grannan, president and CEO of Vlingo, said: “Natural and unconstrained voice recognition user interfaces represent the next major breakthrough for the mobile industry as well as many other industries.
Based on our evaluation, we have seen significant accuracy and performance gains with Watson compared to other core speech technologies that will allow us to create a dramatically improved user experience. We look forward to deploying our joint solutions throughout the industry.”
