CHELTENHAM, England and SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 7, 2009 — Novauris Technologies of Cheltenham, England and Sunnyvale, Calif. and Traffic Gate of Tokyo, Japan today announced an iPhone app incorporating speech recognition to provide route guidance on the Tokyo public transportation system.
With over 660 stations in its railway and underground network, negotiating the Tokyo public transport system is no easy matter, even for seasoned commuters. Now, speech technology developer Novauris Technologies is bringing route guidance to Japanese travelers equipped with an iPhone. Working with the dominant Japanese Internet advertising company, Traffic Gate (owned by Rakuten, Inc., the largest online shopping mall operator in Japan), Novauris has developed a Japanese speech recognition application in which travelers speak the Japanese equivalent of “from A to B” into their iPhone and are shown the price of the ticket, estimated time of travel and the step-by-step set of trains and changes they need to get from any departure station A to any destination station B. The application also displays a map of the area around the two stations and – by making use of the iPhone’s ability to know its own location – the route by car or foot to the departure station.
Apple has indicated that they plan to promote the application – called Koetan, meaning “voice search” – as a Featured App for the iPhone. While the iPhone in Japan did not have the immediate acceptance seen in the West, it has now become immensely popular, with the respected U.S. TechCrunch blog recently estimating sales of 1 million units.
Currently, the information provided by Koetan is entirely in Japanese, and users need to specify their desired journey in Japanese with a reasonably convincing accent. However, development of a version in English with anglicized pronunciations of the station names is under consideration.
Commenting on the launch of the iPhone-based service in Japan, Novauris CEO Yoon Kim said: “Seeing our speech recognition technology being used in Japan is particularly exciting; no one in our company is a native Japanese speaker, yet we seem to have succeeded in developing noise-robust speech recognition in this language with a level of performance that evidently amazes native speakers. We hope to see the same success in Japan as we have had in the U.S.”
This first foray into the Japanese market by Novauris follows its earlier entry into the U.S. market in supplying speech recognition to allow Verizon Wireless subscribers to select any of over 1 million entertainment items (mainly music titles) just by speaking it.
A few weeks ago at the SpeechTEK Conference in New York City, U.S. provider of telephone-based speech services, Angel.com, announced that it would be using Novauris speech recognition to take down U.S. street addresses from callers. Previously, services needing to note an address provided by a caller either needed to use human operators or required the caller to speak the address laboriously piece by piece: state, city, street, house number, for example. For the first time in a fully automated commercial service, the Novauris solution allows callers to speak the address as a single utterance as they would to a human operator.
About Novauris(R) Technologies
Novauris’ NovaSearch(R) technology, based on its proprietary speech recognition engine, lets people access information quickly and easily by voice. With just a single utterance, a user can select from millions of items (addresses, music tracks, etc.). NovaSearch can run entirely locally on mobile devices such as smartphones or PNDs, or it can run on a server, handling voice requests from many mobile phones simultaneously. For more information, visit http://www.novauris.com.
Contact:
Yoon Kim
(408) 524-3094
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