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Nuance's new voice-control software tracks your personality across devices

Nuance's new voice-control software tracks your personality across devices

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nuance wintermute
nuance wintermute

We just met with Nuance at CES to get a first-hand look at the company's new Wintermute project, which aims to provide a consistent voice assistant experience across platforms. The software works similarly to something like Siri, but it was demoed working on iOS, Android, Windows, and a smart TV — remembering your requests and preserving history across them all. For example, you could ask your phone to play a certain song, and then later in the day say something like "play that song I was listening to this morning" when using your computer. The text-to-speech voice has personality, too, making bad "Start Me Up" puns in response to a request for the Rolling Stones and so on.

There were a couple of times in our demo when the device failed to recognize a voice recognition command, as is common with such software, but the integration across platforms was seamless. Nuance says it's working with multiple OEMs to get Wintermute on devices, but there's nothing to announce for now about when the cross-platform personal assistant dream will become a reality.