UK's Novauris announces global slaes and marketing alliance with Panasonic in embedded speech recognition

NovaLite will be available in Q1 2012, and will be sold jointly by Panasonic System Networks and Novauris Technologies under a global sales and marketing alliance.

“We have been impressed by Novauris's scalable, large-vocabulary ASR, and are delighted to be able to contribute to the technology and to making it more widely available to companies looking to speech-enable their products,” added Teddy Fukae, Group Manager at Panasonic.

NovaLite has been designed to be suitable for a broad range of ASR applications running on the processors in devices such as smartphones, tablets, game consoles, navigation systems, audio/video devices, etc. Such applications include one-shot destination entry for navigation, flexible voice commands, selection of music titles and other entertainment items, pronunciation scoring for language learning, voice search for on-device information and features, and the use of spoken input in interactive games. Languages supported include American and British English, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French and Canadian French, Italian, Castilian, Mexican Spanish, and German. Further languages will be added during the course of 2012.

NovaLite is adapted for platforms and operating systems including Android, iOS and Linux. An SDK is now available for developing applications for these environments.

“There have recently been impressive advances in cloud-based speech recognition for mobile devices, however there are many advantages to having the option of a powerful speech recognition function locally without any need for network access,” explained Yoon Kim, CEO of Novauris. “We see our alliance with Panasonic as providing a real step forward in embedded speech recognition, benefitting from Panasonic’s experience in developing extremely compact ASR software in many languages. The bringing together of Novauris’s technical expertise and Panasonic’s worldwide sales channels and support network also creates major new commercial opportunities.”