Seevl, the free music discovery service that leverages semantic technology to help users conduct searches across a world of facts-in-combination to find new musical experiences and artist information, has launched an app for Deezer that will formally go live Monday.  (See our in-depth look at Seevl here, and a screencast of how the service works here.) Deezer is a music streaming service available in more than 150 countries – not the U.S. yet, though – that claims more than 20 million users.

Seevl, which late last year updated its YouTube plug-in with more music discovery features and better integration with the YouTube user interface, models its data in RDF. In a blog post earlier this year, founder and CEO Alexandre Passant explained how the Seevl service uses Redis for simple key-value queries and SPARQL for some more complex operations, like recommendations or social network analysis, as well as provenance. As for the new Deezer app, it provides the same features as the YouTube app for easily navigating and discovering music among millions of tracks, Passant tells the Semantic Web Blog.

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Nuance has upped their game, reports Kevin Fitchard of GigaOM. He writes, “Nuance Communications has been trying to recreate its incredibly useful  — but rather one-trick — Dragon Go semantic search app as a full-fledged mobile voice assistant on par with Siri and the new Google Now. It renamed it Dragon Go as Dragon Mobile Assistant in October and expanded its voice command capabilities beyond search into the application stack of the Android phone, where it could compose texts, make calls, set appointments and fetch directions. On Thursday, Nuance updated Mobile Assistant’s feature set. You can now play music by telling Dragon you want to listen to a particular artist or track in your song library. You can also open third-party apps with a voice command. Another small but highly useful enhancement is the ability to set an alarm with a simple spoken command.” Read more

Kevin Fitchard reports, “Swype, the text-input interface now common on Android phones, just got a whole lot smarter. New owner Nuance Communications is updating Swype with the same sophisticated contextual-language technologies it uses in its speech-recognition products. The result is what Nuance is calling a ‘living keyboard’ — one that can learn both its user’s vocabulary and his habits. For starters, Nuance is fully implementing into Swype the XT9 predictive text technologies originally developed by Tegic. Nuance has built on Tegic’s algorithms, though, expanding its prognostication abilities beyond just words to the formation of sentences and phrases.” Read more

Kevin Fitchard reports, “There are a lot of bad Siri imitators in the Android Market, but Monday night a pretty close approximation to Apple’s now-iconic personal assistant will be available. At CES, Nuance Communications is launching an Android version of Dragon Go, its voice-powered semantic search app. Nuance developed the speech recognition and natural language technology that powers Siri and many other voice assistant services, but it also maintains its own consumer-facing applications under the Dragon banner.” Read more

You’ve probably read a couple of hundred remembrances and memorials to Steve Jobs in the last day. Don’t worry – this little blog isn’t going to rehash each of his amazing achievements.

Rather, perhaps the sad news of his passing might provide an opportunity to reflect on what it means to innovate, and what it means to be an innovator. Apple’s well-known mantra – Jobs’ coaxing of his fans to “think different” – isn’t just something we’ve seen played out in the design of that company’s products, or in the sheer genius Jobs had for tapping into the zeitgeist, turning it around, and building a business model out of it.

Certainly those are the most obvious fruits to most people. But the work the Semantic Web community is doing exemplifies the “think different” attitude every day. That’s true of products like Apple’s Siri that bring some (now) in-house semantic smarts to Jobs’ creations, as well as a host of others whose creators hope to harness new opportunities from Jobs’ tablet revolution.

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Dragon Go!, the free speech recognition app that lets you talk to your Apple devices, is getting an upgrade. The update “adds many more options, including the ability to launch popular movie and TV streaming services; get direct access to more of the most popular names in mobile content, like Spotify; get answers to the toughest of questions from Wolfram|Alpha and Ask.com; and, find friends on Google+.” Read more

After releasing Dragon Go! For the iPhone and iPad, Nuance Technologies looks to be providing the speech technology for iOS 5. Given that Nuance provides the vocal language interface for Siri, the intelligent personal digital assistant that was later acquired by Apple, this doesn’t come as a big surprise.  In a recent interview, Nuance CTO Vlad Sejnoha “painted a broader picture of how speech technology is poised to be a game-changer for smartphones, especially as they get embedded deeper into the operating systems and hardware. He said speech is transforming from an alternative to text input into a much more powerful tool that can understand user internet and connect them more quickly to information, using natural language processing, semantic analysis and cloud computing. In essence, speech is becoming the smart short cut for mobile.”   Read more

Nuance Communications has released Dragon Go!, a “revolutionary and free application for iPhone and iPod touch that gives consumers immediate, direct access to the mobile content they want. Dragon Go! marks a generational leap in the mobile content experience to pick up where search leaves off. Not only does Dragon Go! hear what people are searching for, but it understands what they want, giving them direct access to relevant results from 180 of the most trusted and reliable content providers, including AccuWeather, Bing, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, iTunes, Last.fm, LiveNation, Milo.com, OpenTable, Pandora ® internet radio, Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, YouTube, Yahoo! and many others – with the list of content providers growing each day.” Read more