Amazon announced today that they will acquire Ivona Software. Ivona is the company that currently supplies the Kindle Fire line of tablets with its speech recognition capabilities. Although there is little in the way of details regarding the terms of purchase, we can be certain that this signals an increased emphasis on audio input in the future for these products.
The immediate assumption that has to be made after this acquisition is that Amazon has its eye on a Siri imitation or something with similar capabilities. Now naturally there has been some disappointment over how poorly Siri has lived up to the hype for iPhone users, but that doesn’t change anything about the appeal of the concept or the possibility that this could be a big thing for the future.
That’s especially true if Amazon ever comes through with their frequently-rumored Kindle Live Person Phone. While we haven’t exactly seen any details emerging so far, indicating that this is a long way off yet even if it will probably be a future focus for the company, building this sort of capability to establish feature parity with Apple and Google products only makes sense. There wouldn’t be much room to undercut prices the way the Kindle Fire made its big first impression on the tablet scene, so being able to line up with other popular smartphones feature for feature could be particularly important.
On the tablet side of things, there are other ways that Ivona could help things improve. Since the Kindle Fire HD is a consumption-based media tablet, it’s only natural to assume that something along the line of the Microsoft Kinect’s voice controls could be in the works as well. Hooking up a tablet to stream Amazon Instant Video to your HDTV and being able to control it with a word from across the room would be quite nice if they can pull it off properly.
The potential for improving accessibility is also worth noting. Ivona already works in various ways to improve support for the blind and visually impaired. That would probably be more useful on the eReader side of things. Amazon’s initial attempts to get their eReading line made into a standard educational tool were hindered by its inability to accommodate the visually impaired. They have come a long way since then in various products, but this could offer new directions for them to approach the problem from.
Perhaps most important, though less impressive in terms of new feature selections, is the possibility that this will lead to more expansive localization options. The press release makes a point of noting that Ivona offers voice and language products in 44 voices across 17 languages with a number more still in development. Given the international growth of the Kindle line as a whole, that’s not a bad resource to be able to draw on.