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Nuance Communications, a provider of voice and language solutions, has announced that more than 10,000 developers have joined the companys NDEV Mobile developer program.
The jump from zero to more than 10,000 mobile app developers in a little more than a year is significant in the companys effort to make its voice-enabling technology ubiquitous. Launched in January 2011 as the Nuance Mobile Developer Program, NDEV Mobile brings the power of Nuances Dragon voice recognition to mobile developers worldwide with the Dragon Mobile software development kit (SDK), supporting more than 20 languages for voice recognition and more than 30 for text-to-speech.
Wed like to thank our developers for helping us achieve this milestone, said Michael Thompson, executive vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, in a statement. NDEV Mobile provides a unique opportunity for developers to work with Dragon and other key Nuance technologies, engineers and designers to make their apps even better across devices, operating systems and languages.
Nuance said NDEV Mobile voice transaction volume has increased 384 percent in the last six months, and NDEV Mobile apps being developed for Android, Windows Phone 7 and those supporting HTTP interface have increased 47 percent in the last six months. In addition, 70 percent of all developers are working to develop apps across multiple languages. Also, more than 50 percent of developers participate in NDEV Mobiles advanced support programs, and 60 percent of participating developers are located outside the United States.
Top brands in lifestyle, food, retail, finance, gaming, message dictation, social and Web browsing applications have leveraged the power of Dragon, including Price Check by Amazon, Merriam-Webster, Kraft iFood Assistant, Coupons.com Grocery iQ, Shopping List by Recipe.com, Snapguide, Dolphin Sonar, OnStar RemoteLink and many others. NDEVs extensive language support has also made possible some of the industrys most popular translation applications, including SayHi Translate, Vocre and most recently a social language learning app called PlaySay, Nuance said.
NDEV Mobile offers three service tiersSilver, Gold and Emeraldthat give developers choice and flexibility in how they voice-enable their specific applications, with as much or as little support as needed.
The Dragon Mobile SDK is available for iOS 4.0 and 5.0 (iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch), Android 2.1 and higher, Windows Phone 7.1, and via an HTTP Web services interface.
Nuance changed the name of the Nuance Mobile Developer Program to NDEV Mobile in September 2011 and added the three new service tiers as well as support for Windows Phone. At that time, Nuance said NDEV had more than 4,000 iOS and Android developers signed on to access the Dragon Mobile SDK across the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia.
With the programs name change, Nuance also made eight new speech-to-text languages supported by the Dragon Mobile SDK available to all NDEV Silver, Gold and Emerald members Canadian French, Americas Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, Taiwan Mandarin and Cantonesein addition to already supporting U.S., Australian and U.K. English, European Spanish, European French, German, Italian, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese for dictation and search.
The success of our NDEV Mobile developer program has proven that our market-leading voice capabilities drive incredible value for developers across a variety of markets, Thompson said in a statement in September 2011. Our new multi-tiered services options deliver developers the options and services theyve been asking for. Its never been easier to deliver the power of voice-enabled apps to the market, tailored and customized to meet the needs of each app’s unique consumer base.
In addition to the aforementioned apps, NDEV Mobile has voice-enabled some of the markets most popular apps, including Siri, Ask for iPhone, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, SpeechTrans, Yellow Pages and AirYell from Avantar, iTranslate, Taskmind, BonApp and many others.