Amongst other rumors about iOS 5 that somehow just disappeared into the ether come yesterday’s WWDC 2011 keynote was the advanced Nuance-powered voice control features that has been reported extensively over the past few months. The only mention of voice recognition was a throwaway line on a slide: “Option to speak text selection.”
Is that it? What happened to the voice control that we were all promised? Don’t worry just yet: according to a couple of prominent sources, Nuance-powered voice control is still coming to iOS 5.
Techcrunch is reporting that Apple still plans on incorporating Nuance tech within ioS 5 before the software is released in September. It’s already in Lion, and it’s already up and running in Apple’s North Carolina data super center. Heck, Nuance’s Chief Mobile Technology Architect was actually in the WWDC keynote audience yesterday. Everything’s in place for Nuance integration… except the finalized deal.
Robert Scoble agrees: he says his source says that Siri integration is coming, but just wasn’t ready in time for the WWDC 2011 keynote. It’ll instead debut in fall, as the cool new feature Apple shows off before pushing iOS 5 to the masses.
If voice recognition does come to iOS 5 come September, though, don’t expect it in every app: since Apple did not debut voice recognition at WWDC, that may mean that when they do debut their advanced voice recognition tech, which allows you to dictate your input for any text field, it may only work in iOS’s native apps, and not be available as a dev API… at least at first.
