Nuance8 is the latest version of a speech recognition product available from a company called Nuance. Like many speech aware applications, it is targeted at the telephony market, mainly because this is one area where computing is still developing, and also because users' choices of interfacing with a computer via a phone are limited to either voice or using the number pad. Clearly if the flexibility of language could be harnessed, users would benefit greatly.
One of Nuance8's impressive features is its trademark Listen and Learn technology which enables the system to adapt to individual caller's voice characteristics, making it speaker independent. Another of its attractive features is its Say Anything technology which allows users a wide range of responses to system questions, including utterances like "I'd like to, um, get my, um, bank balance".
Permitting silences and mumblings within utterances, and more importantly still correctly recognising the sentence, is an ideal characteristic for a voice-enabled application as it gives the user much more freedom and helps to lower frustration; a huge factor in whether users continue to use such applications.