From Smartphone to Car, Dragon Drive Delivers Expansive and Flexible Platform for a Safer, Smarter Personal Assistant Experience behind the Wheel

BURLINGTON, MA--Nov 13 2013: Nuance Communications, Inc. today introduced a new generation of its Dragon Drive connected car platform. Dragon Drive now features new content and application services, combining Nuance’s voice, natural language understanding (NLU) and personal assistant capabilities to create a customizable content delivery platform for a safer, smarter connected car.

“Dragon Drive is a powerful combination of connected infotainment technologies that gives automakers incredible flexibility and freedom in how they design and develop their own branded connected car experience.”

“Dragon Drive is evolving beyond voice to include Dragon Drive Connect and Dragon Drive Link, marking a significant expansion of our automotive business with fully customizable content and app delivery services,” said Arnd Weil, vice president and general manager, automotive, Nuance Mobile. “Dragon Drive is a powerful combination of connected infotainment technologies that gives automakers incredible flexibility and freedom in how they design and develop their own branded connected car experience.”

Dragon Drive is comprised of three key components, including:

Dragon Drive Connect is Nuance’s new content delivery and user management service that integrates leading content services and applications that have been optimized for in car use. It already boasts an impressive lineup of content provider services, including Yelp, Infogroup, Slacker Radio, TuneIn Radio, Deezer, Rdio, AccuWeather, OPIS/ Gas Buddy, Xignite, STATS, INRIX, TomTom, West World Media's Cinema-Source, MovieTickets.com, Reuters, Twitter, Facebook and others.

Dragon Drive Connect and its Transform Engine allows automakers to easily optimize and integrate content services into the car, and conduct over-the-air updates to a Dragon Drive system. This capability allows apps to work without interruption when APIs or app updates occur, and more importantly, give consumers access to current apps and services over the ownership lifetime of a car.

Dragon Drive Link manages cross-platform connectivity between the vehicle and smartphones – carrying an in-progress app interaction on a smartphone directly into the in-car system. For instance, people can enter destination details on their Dragon Drive navigation smartphone app, which then automatically becomes available via the app in the head unit – simply get in and start driving. Dragon Drive Link automatically authenticates the driver and their user profile information for apps and services once they enter the car.

Dragon Drive Speech is Nuance’s automotive-grade natural language voice platform that lets people speak to dictate text messages and emails, as well as access and control any application or service – embedded in the vehicle or in the cloud. Dragon Drive Speech now also lets people check the weather, search and navigate to points of interest, manage their calendar, update social media stats, as well as search for music in the car or streaming from connected radio services.

“Going forward cars will be connected to content and services. However, automotive manufacturers often need to engage multiple parties to create a compelling connected car platform – for content and applications, for voice and HMI, and for connectivity capabilities,” said Chris Schreiner, Director of Automotive Consumer Insights for Strategy Analytics. “By combining a content and applications services platform with its leading voice and NLU capabilities, Nuance is simplifying the connected car integration for automakers with access to all of the customizable components they require.”

Nuance today also announced the availability of its Dragon Drive Speech SDK to give developers the ability to integrate both embedded and connected voice as part of their custom applications. Dragon Drive SDK features Nuance voice recognition, text-to-speech, speech signal enhancement and natural language technology supporting twelve languages across North and South America, Europe and Asia.