Speak, and you’ve made a purchase

While ultrabooks and super-skinny OLED (organic light-emitting diode) TVS hog most of the attention at CES, voice-control technology is turning up the volume.

More gadgets feature voice-based controls, and soon, the trend will be “pervasive,” says Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of the mobile division at Nuance.

“Every consumer electronics company in the world is looking at how to utilize this better input. Users like it more, and it drives more usage and convenience.”

The voice control push was propelled by devices such as Microsoft’s Kinect sensor for the Xbox 360 and iphone 4S voice assistant Siri, a feature powered by Nuance technology.

“They've mainstreamed speech in a huge way, and that’s been great for the industry,” Thompson says.

At CES, Nuance unveiled the Dragon TV platform to deliver voice-enabled controls to future sets.

Users can perform tasks such as changing the channel (“Go to CNN”), viewing guides (“What's on tonight?”) and searching for programs (“Find comedies”). Judging from a brief demo, the controls seemed responsive and quick to understand commands.

With smart TVS, users will also be able to open apps such as Google or Youtube, and even shop for items with only their voices.

“The technology and the applications have been expanding dramatically over the last several years,” says Thompson. “Now, we’re shipping much more sophisticated solutions that can do a variety of things.”

On the mobile front, Nuance’s popular Dragon Go app for Apple's IOS is available for Google’s Android operating system. The app lets users tap a button and speak into their device. For example, a user could say, “Shop for TV” and the app takes you to an Amazon Web page, or, “Play Lady Gaga on Pandora” and it opens the music app to play a song.

The app works with several partners, including ESPN, Facebook, Opentable and Wikipedia.