MundoFox, New Spanish-Language Network, to Make Debut

The following is an excerpt from an article in 

The New York Times
Monday, August 13, 2012

MundoFox, New Spanish-Language Network, to Make Debut

By TANZINA VEGA

LOS ANGELES — The correspondents were on camera and on location in Mexico City, Washington and Los Angeles. Rolando Nichols, the lead anchor, listened intently to the microphone in his ear as he stood in front of the bright red walls of the news studio.

But the news would have to wait: engineers and producers in the control room were having trouble with the sound coming from one of the microphones.

Fortunately, this was not a live news broadcast. It was a test run for MundoFox, the newest Spanish-language network in the United States.

On Monday, the network — a partnership between Fox International Channels, owned by the News Corporation, and RCN Television in Colombia — will make its official debut in 50 cities in the United States, including Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and New York.

MundoFox will be entering a market long dominated by Univision and the smaller Telemundo as it tries to gain the attention of the millions of Latinos in the United States who watch Spanish-language programming. The effort is estimated to cost $50 million.

By the end of the year, network executives say they expect to be in 60 cities, reaching nearly 80 percent of Latino audiences in the United States. It is the first time RCN will be part owner of a broadcast network in the United States.

For more, visit www.nytimes.com.

Nuance Introduces Nina, the Virtual Assistant for Mobile Customer Service Apps

Press release:

Nina is the First Virtual Assistant to Understand What is Said – And Who is Saying It;
First to Provide an Open SDK for Mobile App Developers

Burlington, MA – August 6, 2012 – Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today introduced Nina, the virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps. With Nina, companies can quickly add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to their existing iOS and Android mobile apps, greatly enhancing the self-service experience for their customers. Nina combines Nuance speech recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), voice biometrics, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology hosted in the cloud to deliver an interactive user experience that not only understands what is said, but also can identify who is saying it.

Nuance also announced that USAA, a leading financial services provider that serves members of the U.S. military, veterans and their families, has adopted the virtual assistant for use within its popular mobile app. A pilot is planned for August and the functionality will launch to all USAA members early next year.

“USAA’s innovative solutions are designed to make life easier for our highly mobile military service members, and increasingly for all members who now expect to get things done when, where and how they want.” said Neff Hudson, assistant vice president of emerging channels for USAA. “We believe that the virtual assistant has tremendous potential to make it simpler, faster and more satisfying for our members to manage their financial affairs on their mobile devices.”

Nina is significant because it is the first virtual assistant customer service app to incorporate both speech recognition and voice biometrics into a single integrated solution. Nina is also the first solution that provides an open software development kit (SDK) to support the rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into existing mobile applications. In addition, Nina is the first to allow organizations to brand their own virtual assistant persona, including the visual appearance and implementation of optional custom TTS voices.

“Nina is a watershed innovation for the automated customer service industry, not only because it brings the virtual assistant directly into an app, but because it raises the bar through its level of interactive dialog and language understanding,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division. “Nina provides our customers a major competitive differentiator by enabling more successful self-service through their mobile apps. We are especially pleased to further our partnership with USAA, a company known for its innovation and approach to delivering a premier mobile customer service experience to its members.”

The Nina Virtual Assistant for customer service is comprised of:

• Nina Virtual Assistant Persona: Nina is a pre-made virtual assistant persona, which developers can leverage for their app, or use the available source code to quickly create a custom persona, including changing visual persona elements such as being awake, asleep, listening, processing, or answering a request. Nina also includes a range of existing Nuance text-to-speech voices, and Nuance can develop a custom TTS voice for an optional development fee.
• Nina Virtual Assistant SDK: To enable the rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into mobile apps for Apple iOS and Android, the Nina Virtual Assistant SDK has three components:
• Nina Core APIs – Binary APIs that provide access to the core cloud services, such as speech recognition, text to speech and NLU. This provides the most control and customization possible to the mobile app developer.
• Nina Virtual Assistant APIs – Source APIs that provide mobile app developers with access to customize the persona, as well as providing control of all modes of input, including speech recognition, text to speech and touch dialogs.
• Nina Reference Designs – Source code of Nina Virtual Assistant apps and functions, including the Nina Banking Assistant, deliver pre-designed templates and tasks for store location, bill pay, account information and over 200 other banking related queries. Developers will be able to leverage the reference designs to rapidly develop their own virtual assistant capabilities for travel, insurance, retail, government and more.
• Nina Virtual Assistant Cloud: The power and intelligence of Nina, including Nuance’s industry-leading speech recognition, TTS, NLU, interactive dialog management and voice biometrics services, is delivered through Nuance’s hosted platform, Nuance On Demand.

Availability

The Nina Virtual Assistant SDK and cloud service is available now from Nuance in US, UK and Australian English, with additional languages to be made available later this year. Nuance provides professional services in support of Nina and virtual assistant implementations.

For more information about Nina: http://www.nuance.com/meet-nina.

About Nuance Communications

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Words by the Millions, Sorted by Software

Excerpt from an article in

The New York Times (Business)

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Words by the Millions, Sorted by Software

By ANNE EISENBERG

IT just keeps growing — the vast electronic archive of books, journals and scholarly literature stored on the Web. But scientists are aiming to keep up with this trove of collective knowledge by devising computer-based tools to winnow and quantify it.

David M. Blei of Princeton University is among those who are teaching computers to sift through the digital pages of books and articles and categorize the contents by subject, even when that subject isn’t stated explicitly.

For decades, of course, librarians and many others have labeled books and documents with keywords. “But human categorization can only go so far,” said Dr. Blei, an associate professor in computer science. “We don’t have the human power to read and tag all this information.”

To cope with the information explosion, Dr. Blei and other researchers write algorithms so that computers can sift through millions of works and find their common themes by sorting related words into categories. It’s a field called probabilistic topic modeling.

Other research tools identify shifts in language over time that could signal important cultural, scientific or historical changes. At Harvard, Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, who jointly lead a group there called the Cultural Observatory, will soon inaugurate a browser that searches for such language changes in a large online repository of scientific papers known as arXiv (pronounced like “archive”).

Users will be able to type in one or two words at the site, called Bookworm-arXiv, and immediately see a graph showing the ups and downs of the phrase’s use in the archive, Dr. Michel said. (A test version is at arxiv.culturomics.org.) Users can then click on the graph and drill down to read the original papers in which the terms appear, tracing ideas back toward their roots, or to spots where scientific ideas spread from one field to another.

News Release from Nuance

Leaders in Healthcare Partner with Nuance for Enterprise-Wide Clinical Speech Recognition Solutions

Proven Results and Expanded Portfolio Capabilities Drive Customer Adoption; HIMSS 2012 to Showcase Advancements to Voice, Clinical Language Understanding, and Mobile Solutions from Nuance

LAS VEGAS, HIMSS 2012, Booth #3523, February, 21, 2012 – From HIMSS 2012, Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) announces preeminent new healthcare customers and expanded deployments of its industry-leading, clinical speech recognition solutions. Supporting the needs and preferences of more than 450,000 healthcare providers across more than 10,000 institutions, Nuance’s healthcare portfolio of voice and clinical language understanding (CLU) solutions continues to be recognized as industry standard for the high-quality capture and intelligent use of clinical information.

Nuance’s healthcare portfolio holds multiple top-ranked positions within the 2011 Best in KLAS Awards: Software & Services report including eScription, which has been #1 within the speech recognition category for eight consecutive years,Dragon Medical Practice Edition and PowerScribe 360 Reporting.

“Nuance has a proven track record in speech recognition. Their longstanding success is nearly unmatched across the industry, with eScription winning eight consecutive Best in KLAS Awards,” said Adam Gale, President of KLAS.  “Over the past several years, KLAS has watched Nuance acquire, develop and deliver technologies that continue to automate the clinical documentation information lifecycle. Customers are excited to share the impact and return on investment these solutions are having on the clinical documentation process. As the need to turn disparate medical data into actionable information rise, we expect to see provider demand for natural language processing or Clinical Language Understanding solutions to also grow. This creates an exciting opportunity for Nuance.”

Joining the company of leaders in healthcare around the world, organizations including Banner Health, Carle Foundation Hospital and Physician Group, Carolinas Healthcare System, Catholic Health Partners, Lafayette General Medical Center, Lancaster General Health, Martin Health System, Norton Healthcare, Providence Health Plans, Radiologic Associates, PC, Roper St. Francis Healthcare, Saint Charles Health System, Saint Francis Hospital and Health Centers, Samaritan Health Services, Singing River Health System, The Valley Hospital, Via Christi Health and UCSF Medical Center have all partnered with Nuance to empower their clinicians to document care by simply speaking. Through the delivery of clinical speech recognition solutions and Nuance Transcription Services, Nuance is helping to make physicians more productive as part of the clinical documentation process, resulting in better quality notes, improved use of electronic health record (EHR) systems, and efficiency gains that drive cost savings for the healthcare enterprise.

Voice of Customer Testimonials

“In December, we expanded Dragon Medical across our healthcare enterprise, enabling 260 providers access to voice-driven, real-time documentation as part of the Epic EHR workflow,” said Ed Collins, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Martin Health System. “Dragon Medical has proved to be an invaluable tool for our clinicians. In fact, the ongoing requests for Dragon Medical continue and we expect will expand to our nursing staff. With Dragon Medical, we’ve been able to reduce the cost of medical transcription by two-thirds in the first 60 days, our medical record turnaround time has gone from 24 hours+ to being instantaneous, our physicians can leverage voice-powered shortcuts to be more productive, and the quality of our notes has increased dramatically.”

“We deployed Dragon Medical to over 150 providers across our physicians’ offices and because of the success we achieved there, will extend Dragon Medical enterprise-wide across our hospitals,” said Michael Ripchinski, MD, medical director, clinical informatics at Lancaster General Health.  “In Nuance, we see more than a partner for voice recognition; we’re also intrigued by their progress and innovation in Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) technologies.  Through ongoing work with Nuance, we’re committed to leveraging voice-driven solutions to optimize the way we document within the EHR, and will explore ways to better access and interact with our data with CLU-powered solutions.” 

Nuance’s voice-enabled, clinical understanding solutions empower healthcare organizations to capture structured and unstructured clinical data anytime, anywhere with limited disruption to clinical workflow. Whether a doctor is capturing information from a laptop, desktop, telephone, through a transcriptionist or through a mobile device, with Nuance Healthcare solutions, the whole patient story can be captured.

Please visit Nuance Healthcare at booth #3523 to gain insight into the full portfolio of voice and clinical language understanding solutions. Product demonstrations will be available throughout HIMSS12. You can also follow Nuances’ insight at HIMSS12 via Twitter, @NUAN_Healthcare or visit this link for more detail: http://www.nuance.com/landing-pages/healthcare/HIMSS2012/ .

Nuance Healthcare

Nuance Healthcare, a division of Nuance Communications, is the market leader in providing clinical understanding solutions that accurately capture and transform the patient story into meaningful, actionable information.  Thousands of hospitals, providers and payers worldwide trust Nuance voice-enabled clinical documentation and analytics solutions to facilitate smarter, more efficient decisions across the healthcare enterprise.  These solutions are proven to increase clinician satisfaction and HIT adoption, supporting organizations to achieve Meaningful Use of EHR systems and transform to the accountable care model.  Recognized as “Best-in-KLAS” 2004-2011 for Voice Recognition we invite you to learn more, http://www.nuance.com/for-healthcare/index.htm.

Connect with Nuance Healthcare on:

For the Health of IT blog: http://nuancehealthcareblog.com/

Twitter: http://bit.ly/NuanceHCTwitter

Facebook: http://on.fb.me/NuanceHCfacebook

YouTube: http://bit.ly/NuanceHCYouTube

LinkedIn: http://linkd.in/NuanceHCLinkedIn

News Release from Microsoft

News Press Release
Microsoft’s Local Language Program Bridges Languages, Cultures and Technology

Language translation technology reaches more than 90 percent of global speakers.

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REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2012 — In recognition of International Mother Language Day, Microsoft Corp., a strong supporter of language preservation, today highlighted the company’s Local Language Program (LLP), which enables the development of custom language translation. LLP enables 1.7 billion people worldwide to access technology in their own language, while striving to preserve those local languages and cultural identities. In many parts of the world, technology has transformed the way people and businesses share and use information, improved the way children and adults learn, and helped governments address social and economic issues in ways never before imagined. Languages play an important role in the integration process in all aspects of life, education and the local economies. “Providing technology in a native language is critical to helping people access the tools they need to create better economic opportunities,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president of Worldwide Education at Microsoft. “Language preservation and support also help preserve cultural identities for the next generation of learners.” Microsoft’s services and products focusing on the importance of language and culture through the LLP include the following: • Localized versions of Windows and Microsoft Office are available in 37 languages. • Nearly 100 languages are supported by Language Interface Packs through free downloads for Windows, Office and Visual Studio. • The Microsoft Terminology Collection provides uniformity of meaning to IT terms translated to the local language. • Microsoft Translator allows users to translate text and Web pages in 37 languages. • Microsoft Tellme, a speech recognition platform, works across multiple platforms simplifying everyday tasks. • The Microsoft Language Development Center works on many services, such as speech synthesis technology for under-resourced languages. In addition, through extensive research and development, it creates language opportunities for people worldwide with disabilities. For people to experience the benefits of technology, they must have access to the technology and the skills to use it. In Spain, the Local Language Program has developed Windows and Office in Basque, Valencian, Catalan and Galician. Now, citizens throughout the country have access to technology in their native language and not only Spanish. This impact can provide greater economic opportunities to generations young and old.  “We loved the fact that Microsoft offers software in Valencian because it gives our students the ability to use their native tongue in a modern context,” said Francisco Masquefa, director of the Albal Institut in Valencia, Spain. “The availability of these the programs in our native language shows that Microsoft is truly committed to helping local communities sustain cultural traditions — while supporting advancement through technology.” About Local Language Program Microsoft is committed to helping people worldwide benefit from technology while striving to uphold local language and cultural identity. Representing this commitment, the Local Language Program is a global initiative that provides people access to technology in a familiar language while respecting linguistic and cultural distinctions. Through this program, Microsoft bridges languages, cultures and technology to empower individuals in local communities to create economic opportunities, build technology skills, enhance education outcomes, and sustain their local language and culture for future generations. More information on LLP is available at http://www.microsoft.com/LLP.