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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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