Nuance, arguably the World’s top speech-to-text and artificial intelligence company, has lent its technology to MapmyIndia’s in-vehicle navigation devices.
Unlike traditional navigation devices, which make it difficult to understand the name of the street or area due to the in-built “American accent,” Nuance will develop a technology that will give MapmyIndia devices an “Indian accent.”
This will make Indian street and area names recognizable and drivers won’t have to scratch their heads to figure out that Nangambakkam actually meant ‘Nungambakkam.’
In-vehicle navigation devices, widely used in the West, keep giving vocal (spoken) directions to the driver to enable the latter to reach the preset destination.
“For the first time in India, MapmyIndia will offer GPS navigators that give voice guidance with accurate pronunciation of Indian street and road names,” the Indian company said in a statement.
Nuance has been working on a fool-proof method to convert text to speech and vice versa. It is among the World’s foremost researcher “organization” when it comes to developing algorithms to guess out the relative meaning of words and phrases in a sentence. Besides navigators, most of its clients have been in mobile VAS, computing etc..
The “Indian accented” products, due to be introduced later this year, will cover street names, areas, buildings etc in 1200 cities initially. MapmyIndia said it has plans to introduce such navigation devices in regional Indian languages as well, though they will initially cover only Hindi and English.