AI spoke to Lewis Mowatt, product manager, automotive at Nuance Communications UK

The sixth edition of the Navigation & Location USA show will be held between the 1st and 2nd of December 2009 at San Jose, California. The show is expected to attract more than 150 high level players from the car, PND and mobile OEMs, navigation and location based service providers, geo content providers as well as wireless carriers. This year’s show will focus on how traditional navigation players need to study innovative location-based services to generate new revenues. The questions that will be analyzed thoroughly at Nav&Loc ’09 will be whether in-car integrated navigation systems are the best long term solution and how to generate revenues from navigation based navigation.

“Basic turn-by-turn services are being pushed down the value chain.
Traditional navigation players must now look more closely at innovative
location-based services to generate new revenues and to secure their
position in a market rocked by mobile navigation” says Thomas Hallauer, the founder of TheWhereBusiness.com which organizes the event. TheWhereBusiness.com is part of Telematics Update. The company organizes high-end business-to-business conferences in emerging business opportunities such as location based services, navigation, location intelligence, the geoweb, tracking, advertising and the media and crowd sourcing and communities.

Earlier this year, TheWhereBusiness.com held its Navigation & Location Europe in June in Amsterdam and attracted around 100 participants. The issues discussed included how the mobile opportunity is growing, the new role of the operator, local search and LBS. How live and connected services will directly influence business, the automotive OEM wish list – including ‘eco navigation’ and traffic. Plus there were exclusive insights into the future of location enabled content and UGC and the new international growth regions such as East Europe, Russia, India and China. The show also discussed live and intelligent traffic services, location based advertising, map data evolution, LBS on the web, App shops, VAS, social networking, low cost navigation and community building.

TheWhereBusiness.com says that navigation is not an end in itself but now needs to include usage context, what happens along the way and at destination. The Nav&Loc USA 2009 hopes to help participants take home a list of the critical new navigation services and feature that will create the next buzz in 2010. Plus discussions will be held on evolution of navigation platforms, what they offer and who they target. “As the biggest players expand and redistribute their efforts, look for the partnerships that will enable you to offer new navigation service.

In-Car search results need to be transformed into one relevant, context aware recommendation. Find out how to make map content and POI live, searchable and personal. How is access to map and content evolving? Who are the key players? Is the market still open? Discuss the opportunities for driver specific connected navigation and entertainment services. The PND definition is changing. They are becoming PNS as Box shifting becomes less profitable ($50 in 2010?) – who’s flexible enough to adapt? Where is In-car navigation heading?” says the event organizer.

Berg Insight, one of the partners of the Navigation and Location USA 2009 conference, say that their research has shown that today’s customer is demanding navigation services which are integrated with other applications and services. The responsibility to provide this spans operators, handset vendors and service providers. Plus, the onset of ‘free’ services mean it’s even more important, throughout the value-chain, to deliver an enhance user-experience.

Berg Insight forecasts that more than half of all active users of navigation applications by 2015 will have downloaded the application from an on-device application store, and the majority of these will be marketed by third party service providers.

Another of Nav&Loc USA’s partners is Nuance which is the leading provider of speech and imaging solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Nuance’s automotive speech solutions have been successfully implemented in more than 5 million cars worldwide, representing more than 100 automobile models from more than 25 automobile brands from all major car manufacturers, including Daimler, Fiat, Ford, Nissan and Renault, as well as quality Tier 1 suppliers, such as Aisin AW, Alpine, Bosch Blaupunkt, Bury, Denso, Magneti Marelli and Microsoft.

Nuance offers the most complete, integrated suite of technologies and services to enable voice-activated dialing, voice destination entry for navigation systems, vehicle command and control, and in-vehicle entertainment systems. Its speech recognition and text-to-speech software deliver state-of-the-art performance and a rich set of features and tools tailored for the highly demanding automotive environment.

While companies like Nuance will be giving their predictions of how the navigation and location based products will evolve, there will also be over 30 expert speakers, from companies such as Ford, NIM, Mercedes, Pioneer, Symbian, OnStar, Nextar, Telenav, Nokia, Yelp and OSM will be giving their predictions for the future at Nav&Loc USA 2009.

Automotive Industries spoke to Lewis Mowatt, product manager, automotive at Nuance Communications UK Ltd and one of the key speakers at Navigation & Location USA 2009.

AI: What are some of the strategies being used to use speech as a new service enabler?

Mowatt: Speech is indeed a service enabler, it allows easy access to search large databases on the move in a safer and more efficient manner. We’ve seen this with the uptake of speech for navigation destination entry, Ford SYNC to search the contents of your iPod and connected speech solutions now enabling easy access of real time Point of Interest and similar information.

AI: With regard to safety and usability – what are the new applications speech enables in navigation today?

Mowatt: Today speech is deployed in many vehicles to enter a destination address in multiple steps, a great safety improvement compared to tactile systems as proven by a study by Nuance and the Technische Universität Braunschweig in 2008. BMW and Harman (sat nav) have just launched “one-shot” address entry allowing addresses to be entered in a single utterance e.g. “10 Downing Street, London”, with the map and speech embedded on the device so it works anywhere regardless of network connection. Where a network connection is possible more natural destination entry also accessing real time maps is possible so that usability increases and thus distraction falls increasing safety when the driver can say something like “I’d like to go to Poldinos Italian in Aberdeen please”.

AI: In terms of speech evolution and trends – please give us a glimpse of what speech will do in the next 5 years in the major markets?

Mowatt: Considering the major markets as the existing N. American and European markets we can see an expansion of natural speech input instead of the fixed phrases used by many systems today and the exploitation of connected services to give speech access to real time services and information.

AI: How would you compare the embedded versus the network approaches to speech that enable your service?

Mowatt: Most navigation and location use cases can be well handled today with embedded technology capable of complex tasks such as “one shot” address entry for all of the USA. Network speech technology adds value where the use case requries searching real time, dynamic information such as fuel prices or restaurant opening times. Dictation can be handled as an embedded or network speech solution today but since most dictation applications are for connected services such as SMS creation of “tweets” on social networking sites then it makes sense to leverage the connection and make use of the power of the network systems.

AI: What is your view of emerging markets like China and India? What are prospects like in these regions?

Mowatt: China and India are rapidly developing for in car infotainment services with many car makers in those markets planning systems equivalent to today’s NA/EU systems in 2013. For navigation there are local user interface considerations; in India navigation is almost completely by Point of Interest, in China also but with street addressing used in the major cities. Both markets have huge potential given consideration to these local user interface challenges and using technology that is appropriate to the market.

AI: What are some of the critical issues and challenges facing the industry that will be discussed at the Nav&Loc USA 2009 event?

What will be the impact of “free” navigation from Google?

Demonstrating added value from paid for services,

Usability of integrated solutions over solutions brought in to the car.