Say It, Play It: Unlocking a Safer, More Enjoyable Driving Experience

Today’s drivers have a multitude of entertainment options available to them in their vehicles: traditional radio, satellite radio, CD player/changer, and digital music collections that can easily comprise tens of thousands of titles. While all these entertainment options can make for a more pleasant and enjoyable driving experience, controlling in-car audio systems can be risky business. In fact, studies have shown that controlling a media player is even more distracting than operating a mobile phone while behind the wheel. That’s why Nuance Automotive provides solutions that enable drivers to control car audio systems — easily and safely — by voice. For example, with VoCon Music, a dedicated packaged solution from Nuance, drivers can make entertainment selections just by saying the name of a music, title, artist, playlist, or radio station. It’s that simple and convenient. Say it and play it.

Selecting Radio Station

With VoCon Music, the driver can easily select a radio station by speaking its name or frequency number. The system captures and automatically recognizes radio station names and numbers, so there’s no need to create voice tags. Nuance’s sophisticated speech recognition engine with Natural Language Understanding delivers consistently accurate results — even in noisy automotive environments.

Music Search

When a driver synchronizes his media player with the car audio system or adds new titles, VoCon 3200, the speech recognition engine that powers VoCon Music, automatically adds the names to the recognition lexicon. As a result, the driver is able to select a title, album, artist or playlist by simply speaking the name. Even if he does not pronounce the name exactly as it is listed in the database, the system can use partial name recognition to deliver accurate results. And for music fans whose tastes span the globe, VoCon Music is able to recognize titles and artists in many different languages.

What’s Playing?

As personal music collections expand and evolve, it’s next to impossible to memorize the names of all the titles and artists. With VoCon Music, the driver can simply ask, “What’s playing?” and the system’s Vocalizer for Automotive text-to-speech technology will read out the title and artist name. It’s a great way to satisfy driver curiosity without compromising safety.