Amazon launches new Game Studio

Amazon is getting into the game-making game. The Seattle-based company announced its first major social-game title, "Living Classics," on Monday.

The free Facebook game is the first from its Amazon Game Studios, a new department at the e-commerce giant that was also unveiled Monday.

"Amazon Game Studios is exactly what it sounds like: a new team at Amazon that's focused on creating innovative, fun and well-crafted games," said the company in a blog post on the new games.amazon.com site. The department is currently hiring, but few other details are given.

The social-gaming field is still dominated by Zynga, maker of addictive games such as Farmville and Words With Friends and their various spin-offs. But the company has been struggling since going public in December; Zynga's stock closed at $2.94 a share on Monday.

Yet another social game isn't much of a threat to Zynga, but Amazon has the firepower necessary to become a legitimate competitor, thanks to its large network of customers with active accounts. Amazon can also target any games it does build to users of its popular Kindle tablets.

Amazon isn't revealing much about its motivation for entering the game market, saying only, "We know that many Amazon customers enjoy playing games -- including free-to-play social games -- and thanks to Amazon's know-how, we believe we can deliver a great, accessible gaming experience that gamers and our customers can play any time."

The first game is a simple literature-themed puzzle game.

Players are presented with busy illustrations of scenes loosely based on classic books. To get points called cash and coins, they must quickly spot and click moving objects on the screen. Levels include takes on "Alice in Wonderland," "Wizard of Oz," "King Arthur" and more generic themes such as pirates and haunted houses. ("Classics" could mean more than just books -- one of the illustrations on the official Living Classics Facebook fan page show two X-Files type characters.)

Since this is a Facebook game, there are plenty of opportunities to play the game with friends. And since games are big business, there are options to spend real money on in-app purchases.

Players can stock up on game currency -- a dollar buys you five units of "cash" currency, and $100 gets you 660. However the feature doesn't appear to be working at this time.

RIM's fate hangs on BlackBerry 10

Siri may have her critics, but Apple's talkative virtual assistant is definitely useful for some functions, like checking the weather and texting.

Nuance, which works with Apple on voice control, now plans to take Siri-like abilities to more apps.

The product is called Nina, and it'll let businesses build voice capabilities right into their apps -- iOS or Android -- via a software development kit (SDK). Nuance says it's the first voice assistant with an SDK (Siri still doesn't have one), and Nina obviously has access to all of Nuance's data on the industries that use its tech: banks, airlines, hotels, retailers and more.

Nina is aimed at the enterprise, essentially taking the automated call center functions you might encounter when calling an 800 number, and putting it into an app.

"Nina takes natural-language understanding, and it provides a way for a developer to add that into an app," says Robert Weideman, executive vice president of Nuance's enterprise division.

In a demo at Mashable's offices, Nuance reps showed us a mock banking app equipped with Nina. Responding to commands like "Pay my bill," or even "Pay the full balance on my Visa bill on August first," Nina performed tasks that would probably take complex navigation in one step.

Nina is dependent on Nuance's Voice Assistant Cloud, so she won't work without a network connection. And as we discovered in the demo, her speed and ability to parse longer phrases depend on the quality of that connection. Using a Verizon 3G modem, Nina had trouble figuring out the longer bill-paying command above, but on Wi-Fi she executed it almost instantly.

Nina also happens to sound almost exactly like Siri, though Nuance says businesses will be able to choose from 40 different voices, and even be able to customize it with their own voice "persona," if they have one.

One of the major differences between Nina and Siri is voice biometrics, which means Nina can actually tell that it's you talking, and not someone who just picked up your phone. This can act as both a security and convenience feature -- after all, passwords become redundant if the app can tell it's the right person speaking just by voice.