Nuance’s Dragon Drive Powers the Voice Interface of SAIC’s Connected Car Roewe RX5

Dragon Drive Gives Drivers Smarter, Safer Access to In-Car and Connected Services and Content

Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced that its Dragon Drive connected car voice and content platform powers China’s Roewe RX5 connected infotainment system, developed by a joint venture of SAIC Motor Corp., one of China’s leading car manufacturers and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., China’s e-commerce giant.

The conversational voice interface supporting Mandarin Chinese in the new Roewe RX5 integrates Dragon Drive’s hybrid embedded-cloud voice recognition and natural language understanding (NLU) built on Deep Neural Networks to drive an incredibly accurate and fast voice experience. Dragon Drive also brings speech signal enhancement and text-to-speech, delivering a system that listens, understands and responds in a more intuitive and intelligent manner, ultimately minimizing driver distractions.

The Roewe RX5 offers a number of infotainment and in-car service enhancements including:

• Wake-up word and barge-in: Drivers can simply engage the in-car system just by using their voice, waking up the system by saying “Hello Banma.” And just like in the course of natural conversation, users can interrupt the system at any time with a voice command.
• Natural and flexible control of the navigation system by voice: The user can search for points-of-interest (POI) using natural language or enter a destination by providing the POI category, the name of a place or by speaking the address or crossroads, for example, “Navigate to the crossroads of Nanjing road and Xizang road.”
• A more human conversation: Drivers can quickly and easily make calls, search for music available from streaming services or local media, find weather, and more.

“We’ve worked closely with SAIC to deeply integrate our Dragon Drive platform to deliver an intuitive experience for the Roewe RX5, with incredibly high accuracy, speed and ease of use that exceeds China’s consumer expectations of the connected car. It will undoubtedly change the landscape of the automotive ecosystem in the region,” said Arnd Weil, senior vice president and general manager, Nuance Automotive.

Dragon Drive offers a level of user experience unmatched by aftermarket third party mobile phone solutions or solutions relying on cloud-based speech technology alone. Nuance’s unique hybrid voice capabilities provide drivers with a safer, smarter way to access apps and services, across more than 40 different languages.

AvailabilityThe Roewe RX5 featuring Nuance’s Dragon Drive technology will ship in China in August 2016. The system supports Mandarin Chinese speech recognition and NLU, as well as Mandarin Chinese, Mandarin Taiwanese and Cantonese text-to-speech.

About Nuance Communications, Inc.Nuance Communications, Inc. is a leading provider of voice and language solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with devices and systems. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Nuance, Dragon and the Nuance logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Nuance Communications, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States of America and/or other countries. All other company names or product names may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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For PressNuance CommunicationsRebecca Paquette, [e-mail]