I’ve said it before, and I see more evidence to support it all the time: there are two IoTs. The Consumer IoT has been the home of the gadget and the hype, while the Industrial IoT has been where the industry sees real change happening. I also have thought that the IIoT would get its turn in the hype circle in 2016. And it will.
But now, it looks like the CIoT will also be making some big steps in the next year. Steps toward function over form. And this announcement from Nuance Communications is hopefully only the first of many in this trend.
Nuance this week announced its new Nuance Mix developer platform for mobile and consumer electronics. It will only be available as a limited beta release at first, via the Nuance Developers program, but those who get to use it will find a faster, easier way to create custom voice and natural language interfaces to power smart home, gaming, robotics, and health and fitness devices throughout the next generation of the IoT.
“There is no limit to the potential use cases,” said Ken Harper, Senior Director, Technical Product Management, Nuance. “With Nuance Mix, we’re doing something different. We’re trying to allow developers to build from the ground up.”
It has an all-new natural language understanding development tool, so engineers making new IoT interfaces for consumer use can tap into the same technology that powers the most popular virtual assistants. This language understanding has been mated with the company’s voice recognition and text-to-speech tools so they can create custom models within minutes. Nuance Mix also provides developers with an automated workflow to roll anonymized speech data back into their models to continuously improve accuracy. As a result, the user experience continues to improve over time and developers gain behavioral insights.
Developers also have more freedom of choice in how much or how little support they need based on the level of customization, and will have the option to engage with Nuance directly on design, integration, and speech and natural language development needs.
“The rapidly evolving ecosystem of specialized devices and services for the IoT and Industrial Internet will be defined by the user experience – and the stakes are high in bringing these innovations into an incredibly competitive market,” said Mike Thompson, executive vice president and general manager, Nuance Mobile. “Nuance Mix gives developers and device makers the ability to quickly integrate Nuance’s trusted voice and natural language technology in just a few hours – and with the control and flexibility to make their experience unique and exceptional.”
Check out Nuance Mix and sign up to be among the developers that get early access.
And start building your own methods for bringing the CIoT out of the hype cycle and into the life of every consumer.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
