Tegic outlines search possibilities, including optical recognition
Rating: see what you mean, hinnit
Having been a guest of Nuance recently at Mercedes World in Weybridge, it seemed a jolly good idea to check out how one of the compay’s recent additions - Tegic - was doing at the Symbian Smartphone show. Tegic is only one month into its integration into the Nuance fold, but it looks like there could be some very interesting results from the marriage between the diverse technologies which Nuance now possesses.
Tegic has, of course, long possessed a search application in the shape of the T9 Discovery tool. This provides an easy way to find applications resident on the handset.Typing 248 (blu) takes you immediately to the handset’s Bluetooth application, for example. But Tegic’s T9 predictive text facility could form just one of the ways handsets users would create input for a search engine.
Nuance is famous for its speech recognition technology. So how might these different capabilities be turned into a single intelligent search app? Our source on the Tegic stand, William Clement, hinted, for example, that Nuance has long experience of client server applications – a facility that could prove very handy should you want to provide a mobile search facility that actually works: trying to run a sophisticated search application on most handsets’ processors today has always seemed a daft idea to me.
Another interesting relevation from our little chat with Mr Clement was that optical recognition could be molded into a search facility. It wouldn’t be hard for a cameraphone user to take a picture of a poster and through optical recognition, the search app could work out the subject you want more information about.
The most curious part of the conversation with Tegic, however, was the discovery that there’s something called Hinglish. This is basically born out of the common practice for people to type Hindi words into texts using a Latin alphabet, taking words out of the English language and interspersing them into Hindi. Sadly, I wasn’t able to glean how soon a Hinglish version of T9 would make its appearance in a commercial handset. Nor whether Hinglish would be confined to the Indian sub-continent or make its way into handsets sold into the UK market, for instance.
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