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announced a joint initiative to develop advanced voice navigation applications for the personal navigation device (PND), automotive and mobile markets.

According to a statement, the companies' collective goal is to develop and deliver a voice-user experience so accurate and intuitive that it further enhances the way people use navigation devices, no matter where they choose to use them.

Nuance and VoiceBox are collaborating on applications that combine Nuance's speech technology and natural language suite with VoiceBox's conversational voice search processes, which garner high accuracy and task completion by recognising context and intent from free-form speech, to deliver new and advanced PND functionality.

‘Users of navigation systems feel overwhelmed and confused when confronted with existing user interfaces,’ said Mike Kennewick, co-founder, chairman and CEO at VoiceBox. ‘Our conversational voice-search capabilities will help demystify the powers of navigation. Nuance has the background and products that will help create the best user experience yet; together we can change the way consumers use navigation forever.’

The Nuance and VoiceBox collaboration is intended to provide manufacturers with the ability and flexibility to quickly deploy advanced, multidimensional speech recognition technology on PNDs, embedded telematics and mobile markets, providing easy adoption of the simplified, accurate and intuitive voice-user experience that will bring superior performance to their customers.