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Pebble Time adds voice dictation capabilities to third-party apps

The latest API, which is powered by voice recognition capabilities from Nuance, will allow apps to be developed for the company’s Pebble Time, Time Steel and Time Round smartwatches.

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Pebble will be making the lives of those people who most of the time use and send emails and texts messages easier. The update is already available on the Pebble Time, Pebble Time Steel, and will soon launch with the Pebble Time Round on November 8th. However, iOS has been locked down so much so that this voice control update will require an act on Apple’s part in order to work on iPhones.

Probably the biggest shortcoming when it comes to Pebble smartwatches vs their Android Wear counterparts is Pebble’s very limited support for voice dictation. Talking to your watch will now actually be not weird anymore as Pebble Watch wants you to stop tapping and start talking to your Pebble smartwatch.

So far, there aren’t a lot of apps taking advantage of dictation, but searching for “voice” in the Pebble app store reveals a few new additions. “By opening the Dictation API to Pebble developers, more experiences will be delivered and consumers will be able to connect without having to look at their device”.

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It is yet to be confirmed what kind of voice features are coming to Pebble apps, but the update should make the watch more useful going forward. “Pebble is committed to offering not only a variety of smartwatches that blend into individual lifestyles, but also to expanding the usability of Pebble smartwatches world-wide through frequent software upgrades”, Kean Wong, vice president of Software Engineering at Pebble, said in a statement.

FirstNews Briefs: Boingo, T-Mobile, Yahoo, Nuance and Pebble