Nuance Dragon TV to Voice Enable Panasonic Digital TVs

Monday, February 27th, 2012
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Nuance and Panasonic to Transform the Digital Living Room with Voice, Creating an Interactive and Intuitive Experience with Media

BURLINGTON, Mass. & BARCELONA, Spain — Mobile World Congress 2012 — Nuance Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced that Nuance’s voice technologies were adopted on Panasonic (NYSE:PC; Tokyo:6752) digital TVs to deliver an intuitive and interactive experience with digital program guides. By leveraging Nuance’s recently unveiled Dragon TV platform, Panasonic will bring to market a new portfolio of TVs that provide incredible usability and accessibility to digital content.

As TVs become increasingly connected, consumers now have an opportunity to experience a broad range and largely overwhelming amount of content – be it shows, movies, music and now Internet and social media content. With that comes the challenge of creating a truly interactive experience with media and content, with complicated and sometimes antiquated program guides. By integrating Nuance’s innovative voice technology designed for the digital TV experience, Panasonic will be able to provide its consumers with the ability to engage with and discover TV content faster and easier than ever before.

“TVs have become the epicenter of the digital living room, with what seems to be unlimited entertainment and media content. But that content is only as powerful as the experience and the ability for consumers to access it. By integrating Nuance’s voice technology, Panasonic can empower consumers to enjoy TV watching with Voice Guidance technology in a more universal way,” said Hiroyuki Iwaki, group manager of TV product planning, Panasonic.

Dragon TV is Nuance’s unique voice and natural language understanding platform for TV, device and set-top box OEMs and service operators. Dragon TV makes finding and accessing shows, movies and content in today’s digital living room easy and fun for consumers. Leveraging Nuance’s voice and natural language understanding capabilities, Dragon TV creates the “lean-back experience” consumers demand, with the ability to easily find and interact with content by speaking channel numbers, station names, show and movie names.

“The digital living room is quickly proving to be the next big opportunity for voice, as it lets consumers engage their TVs in a way that is natural and intuitive,” said Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile. “And because our Dragon TV platform is incredibly flexible, we’re able to give our OEM partners like Panasonic new ways to differentiate the TV experience based on the unique demands of their consumers.”

Availability

Panasonic has just started shipping voice-enabled VIERA digital TVs this year in Europe.