Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications announced on Wednesday that it will open an innovation center to house its expanded research and development team in Cambridge. The company behind iPhone's voice assistant Siri has dubbed the new space, located at 675 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square, the Nuance Cambridge Innovation Center.
To further bolster the move, the company also has plans to build out its R&D team, which will work on a number of products in the voice recognition and natural language understanding spaces. Considering the wealth of close-by talent within Cambridge, Central Square is the perfect place to set up shop. With its location at the intersection between Kendall and MIT and Harvard, Nuance "expects to hire dozens of R&D experts over the coming months."
“Cambridge has a history built on technological innovation and visionary thinking, and this is the ideal place for Nuance to expand its commitment to mobile technology,” said Michael Thompson, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Nuance Mobile, in the release. “We’re excited to extend Nuance’s presence to a respected location throughout the technology community, and we’re thrilled to be joining and contributing to the vibrant culture Cambridge has developed over the years.”
The Nuance Cambridge Innovation Center will focus on a number of genres, including cross-platform, conversational interactions across a variety of devices including phones, tablets, TVs, cars, PCs and consumer electronics. According to the press release:
The Cambridge location will advance research in many topics including voice biometrics, wearable technologies, natural language processing, contextual awareness, voice-controlled home automation and cloud-based infrastructure that supports these rapidly maturing capabilities. Research teams will also be focused on the continued acceleration of voice recognition innovation itself across many languages and use cases, leveraging deep belief learning neural networks.
Just last month, Nuance announced a partnership with The Echo Nest, the Somerville company with ownership of the world's largest music data base. With the new deal, Nuance gained access to the music intelligence company's Dynamic Music Data, which helps companies deliver a real-time feed of online music information, to refine its Natural Language Understanding framework, particularly in the music domain. The company's inbound move could be signs of a continued partnership. In any case, the increased proximity to the multitudes of talented engineers and budding startups in Cambridge and Boston presents a great opportunity for Nuance.
