Rachel Metz of Technology Review reports, “Nuance is today announcing Voice Ads, a platform that will let companies create ads that people can talk to on smartphones and tablets. Mike McSherry, vice president of advertising and content at Nuance, says these could range from car ads that let you ask questions about the vehicle shown to ads for a sports network that allow you to get information about who won last night’s game or what time tonight’s game starts. The company has lined up partnerships with several ad agencies including Digitas, OMD, and Leo Burnett, as well as with mobile ad distribution networks JumpTap, Millennial Media, and Ad Marvel.” Read more

Nick Vivion of Tnooz reports, “The latest foray into voice-tech comes from CheapAir.com. The voice activation feature is integrated with the company’s latest iPhone and iPad release, allowing customers to use voice to search for flights amidst the 25 million aggregated fares. The app works very simply: state your departure and destination points, date and time preferences, and the app will process the verbal input to deliver query results.” CheapAir CEO Jeff Klee stated, “We know that more and more travelers want to research flight options with their phones… We’re doing everything we can to make it easier to find the lowest fares and the best flight options. CheapAir was the first travel site to let people search for fares using natural language, we were the first to show which in-flight amenities are on every flight, and now we’ve launched the first voice-activated iPhone app.” Read more

The NY Times reports today that Google acknowledged it had violated people’s privacy during its StreetView mapping project. Thirty-eight states had brought a case against Google on the grounds that the project resulted in people’s passwords and other personal information being unknowingly recorded by the search giant. Google has agreed to settle it by paying a $7 million fine as well as by becoming more aggressive in ensuring that its employees’ efforts don’t violate privacy and informing the public about how to avoid having their privacy compromised.

In its discussion of the settlement, the article brings up that the way now is paved for another privacy battle, this time over Google Glass. Concerns are that Google Glass eyewear also can be used to record photos, videos and audios of the wearer’s surroundings, without the permission of the individuals featured in those surroundings. With Google Glass, users can use their voice to input commands to take a picture or make a video, as well as to take steps less likely to compromise privacy, such as search for facts about landmarks or events.

How that privacy question plays out is yet to be seen. But concerns aren’t stoping the project – which was demonstrated at last week’s SXSW conference – from moving ahead. Google yesterday announced that the glasses will accommodate frames and lenses that match users’ eye prescriptions, for example.

Getting Google Glass to respond to voice commands and searches appears to leverage capabilities it has developed for its Voice Search App for Android, as well as its semantically-driven Knowledge Graph database of hundreds of millions of entities and billions of facts, and their relationships to each other.

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In the fall Google updated its Google TV platform to Version 3.0, touting features like its new Voice Search. This week, expect to hear about a slew of new products with the technology onboard launching at the CES show in Las Vegas.

Google recently reported on its Google TV blog that new partners added to its Google TV list include Asus, Hisense, and TCL.  LG, Sony, Vizio and others will have refreshes of their set-top boxes, integrated TVs, and IPTV boxes with the latest Google TV platform on board.

Consumers that buy into these offerings also will be increasing their exposure to Google’s Knowledge Graph. The Google TV platform’s advanced voice control for changing channels or finding content of personal interest to watch (live or via Internet streaming), its new programming guide app, and its other smarts deliver results with the help of the vendor’s own Knowledge Graph, according to GIGAOM. With the Knowledge Graph, search queries run against a database of entities and relationships — it’s the search engine’s way of, as Google says, understanding “things, not strings.”

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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

Mark Sullivan of PC World recently posed the question, why doesn’t Microsoft have an answer to Siri built into Windows 8? He writes, “Windows 8 is supposed to be Microsoft’s majestic OS reseta dramatic overhaul designed to usher the Windows platform into the age of mobility. And Windows 8 is also Microsoft’s bid to achieve feature parity with iOS and Android, the other two OS powerhouses in the mobile universe. But one key feature–one hot, relevant, rock-star-caliber feature–is conspicuously absent from the Windows 8 repertoire: Intelligent, semantically aware voice control is nowhere to be found in the new OS.” Read more

Ever wish you could have the computer from Star Trek? Now you can. Jon Mitchell of ReadWriteWeb reports, “The new version of Google’s Search app for iOS is available in the App Store, and it’s a good thing, too. This app now offers Google’s version of the Star Trek computer.  Just speak a question in natural language, and Google will reply immediately with the answer. Google submitted this update to Apple in early August. It showed a demo on August 9 that blew my mind. The speed and accuracy of this app’s answers — which, of course, Android users are already used to — shows just how much Apple users are missing out due to Apple’s insistence on bypassing Google with Siri.” 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

Apple’s Siri interface has been attracting derision from higher-ups at Google and Microsoft while the public at large sings Siri’s praises. Andy Rubin, Google’s head of Android recently said, “I don’t believe your phone should be an assistant…Your phone is a tool for communicating… You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.” 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