America News: Sybase iAnywhere offers natural language engine for memory-restricted devices

Sharon

Sharon Gill

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29th May 2007

Sybase iAnywhere has announced it is enabling embedded applications to provide intelligent user interfaces and context-aware user interactions.

Extending the company's Answers Anywhere™ technology, Sybase iAnywhere now offers a natural language engine that targets the memory-constrained world of embedded devices.

“Traditionally when using embedded applications, e.g. embedded speech recognition, users have to comply with the systems’ interface restrictions,” said Babak Hodjat, senior director of engineering, Sybase iAnywhere. “Applying embedded capabilities to our natural language engine takes that burden off of the user, enabling a free-form context–aware dialogue.”

For instance, instead of following tedious voice menus to obtain traffic information from the in-car telematics system, a user can simply say: “I'm going to Comerica Park. Any traffic problems?”

New Answers Anywhere functionality for telematics and embedded devices includes:

• A Java-based, graphics-oriented development tool for generating an agent network model of the natural language application
• Automatic C++ code generator optimised for size and performance in embedded applications
• Support for embedded systems running Windows CE or the QNX operating systems
• Adaptive, agent-oriented software architecture incorporating 22 natural language patents

The new Answers Anywhere capabilities designed for telematics and embedded devices will be available in June 2007.