Conversational user interfaces and natural language processing could be put to much more use than they currently are.  At the GigaOM Structure Data event in New York City this week, IBM distinguished engineer Currie Boyle, who leads the vendor’s North American natural language services practice, including for deep question and answer Watson-type natural language and unstructured information processing systems, and Nuance Communications CTO Vlad Sejnoha, discussed the realized promises, but also the waiting opportunities.

At Nuance, Sejnoha noted, the focus is on the notion that we are entering a time when how we interact with systems and access information and content is undergoing a “dramatic transformation.” Contributors to that include high- level artificial intelligence reasoning and natural language understanding. “We are overwhelmed with lots of data including unstructured data and these technologies make a difference in how we take advantage of all that,” he said.

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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

Elise Ackerman of Forbes recently discussed the present state and foreseeable future of virtual assistants. She begins, “Apple has been working hard to convince us that a glamorous future full of witty personal assistants is attainable for the price of an iPhone. In recent ads, Siri, the personal assistant that debuted with the iPhone 4s, has discussed the philosophy of life with actor John Malkovich and bantered with director Martin Scorsese while helping him rearrange his schedule. The ad campaign is meant to counter criticisms that Siri is sluggish and slow. Siri’s not working as promised, but not for the reasons most people think. They assume that the technology exists, but that Apple released Siri too early. They want to see an upgrade, not more advertisements. But the next version of Siri is not going to be dramatically better. The fact is that artificial intelligence has not advanced to match the imagination of Apple’s marketing team.” Read more

Kevin Fitchard of GigaOM reports, “T-Mobile is giving its rather pathetic MyTouch voice-command feature a much-needed overhaul. It’s incorporating the same semantic-search technology Nuance uses in Dragon Go into Genius, allowing the voice assistant to search over 200 different content providers and understand intent rather than just words.” 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

Christian Zibreg recently reported on the future of Siri and how the service intends to become even more personalized. Zibreg writes, “Digital secretary Siri was, and still is, the headline feature of the iPhone 4S. It owes some of its allure to the vast processing power of Apple’s servers that run a remarkably sophisticated voice recognition software licensed from Nuance, a Burlington, Massachusetts-based provider of arguably the best voice technology money can buy. According to Nuance’s marketing honcho, you can bet on Siri to improve over time.”

He continues, “Upcoming developments in personal assistants will enable new stuff, such as more accurate voice recognition and personalization. So yeah, eventually you’ll be able to ask Siri ‘Is my favourite movie on tonight?’ 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

Nuance – the company behind the cutting-edge voice recognition software Dragon Go! and most likely behind Apple’s new Siri Assistant in the iPhone 4S – has acquired Swype for $102.5 million. The impressive acquisition will allow Nuance to make user interfaces that much more user friendly. The article asks, “What does Nuance, which is known primarily for its speech recognition software engine, want with a gesture-based text entry technology like Swype? (Instead of tapping in letters on a touch keyboard, you swipe between them without lifting your finger).” Read more

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