The entire tech industry watched as Scott Forstall outlined Apple’s 10 most prized (or most ready) new features in iOS 5 last Monday. To everyone’s surprise, the entire presentation went on without any mention of the rumored Apple/Nuance partnership.
TechCrunch and other media outlets reported multiple times last month on sources claiming that Apple and Nuance had struck a deal to bring legitimate voice recognition technology to iOS. But WWDC came and went without a word from either company…
Luckily, the curious community has folks like Chronic poking around the internal settings of iOS 5 to help answer questions that Forstall and company left us with last week. The latest find by the infamous iDevice hacker proves that there is more going on in iOS 5 than meets the eye.
Somewhere hidden in the admin menu is an option to turn Nuance Dictation on or off. There is also a feature called Nuance Long Endpoint that can be enabled or disabled. And if you still don’t believe the Nuance rumors, check out this other feature Chronic came across:
It appears that Apple will give users the option to display a quick-launch icon on the keyboard for the Nuance Dictation feature, much like the microphone icon on the Android keyboard that activates voice recognition. Could this confirm a voice to text feature?
I think we all tend to forget (including me) that WWDC was advertised as a “sneak peak” into iOS 5. It’s likely we won’t see a final product until at least September, which gives Apple plenty of time to add surprises. Stay tuned.
Are you hoping for new voice recognition technology in iOS 5?
[9to5Mac]