Rovi and Nuance team up for voice-enabled content

Rovi and Nuance Communications have teamed up to advance voice activated guidance and content discovery applications for digital entertainment customers.

Nuance has signed a multi-year data licensing agreement for Rovi Video and Rovi Music and plans to integrate Rovi’s rich entertainment data for multiple countries with Nuance’s Dragon TV as well as Nuance’s mobile voice and language understanding platforms shipping on televisions, PCs, tablets and mobile devices. With this agreement, Rovi and Nuance are enabling services and solutions that access Rovi-indexed data on TV shows, movies, and music via voice.

Rovi’s data coupled with Nuance’s voice and natural language solutions provide customers with the ability to bring applications for discovering and consuming content to consumers. Rovi and Nuance are helping drive a cross-platform experience for finding movie and television content or discovering new artists, songs or albums by speaking. Rovi’s editorial, relational linking and standardized descriptor data combined with Nuance’s natural language capabilities enable voice-activated commands to search for and discover content.

“Movies, shows, and music are key elements of the mobile experience that span TV, phones, tablets and PCs.  And with so much content available, people need an effortless and intuitive way to access what they want, when they want it,” said Matt Revis, vice president and general manager, Dragon Devices, Nuance. “By expanding our capabilities to use Nuance’s voice and natural language understanding capabilities with Rovi’s broad movie, TV and music database, we’re able to bring the power of connected content to virtually any device.”

“We believe the expansion of our relationship with Nuance extends our role in voice-activated guidance and discovery of entertainment that is accessible from multiple devices via the cloud,” said Bob Shallow, SVP, product sales & marketing at Rovi. “Our data and services include media analysis, search algorithms, and recommendation engines that, together with Nuance’s voice and natural language platforms, can power innovative applications that take the digital entertainment experience to new heights.”

Rovi has meanwhile expanded its global video data offering, Rovi Video, to serve the Australian and Turkish markets.  The additions support multiple customer expansions and launches Rovi local data services in those markets.  Rovi’s expansive database, comprised of data on an array of international content and local TV programming for over 50 countries worldwide, is used in entertainment applications and devices to help consumers find TV shows and movies to watch.

Rovi will exhibit at IBC on stand 5.A31