Language technology startup VoiceBox announced a partnership with Samsung to use VoiceBox’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology for Samsung’s S Voice services, including Samsung’s intelligent personal assistant.
Currently, S Voice can assist Samsung mobile users with placing calls, sending texts, making appointments, updating social network websites, opening apps, and navigation. It also offers automatic activation features — for example, starting your car engine from outside the car — and can respond to questions.
The new deal with Bellevue, Wash.-based VoiceBox is aimed at helping S Voice keep up with artificial intelligence competitors, like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa.
VoiceBox says its NLU offers the advantage of context tracking through its Context Management software, which means that S Voice will be able to juggle different conversations and requests simultaneously by remembering the domain for each question. VoiceBox’s Context Management also allows users to input data through voice, gesture and touch, integrating each into its language processing so that conversations can take place over multiple inputs.
Since its inception, VoiceBox has partnered with car, smartphone, and wearable manufacturers to offer its speech recognition technology. The new deal with Samsung will allow the company to further its mission of integrating voice technology into the emerging Internet of Things market, said VoiceBox CEO Mike Kennewick in a news release.
