Nuance, the company behind the Dragon Dictation app, are apparently going to the subject of a new, and rather important, partnership with Apple that is expected to be announced at the WWDC meeting in early June, according to TechCrunch. In further detail, apparently a large portion of Apple’s massive North Carolina data center will actually be used to support and host many of the services that the new speech recognition technology will employ.
The report comes as a follow up to a report last week which suggested that Nuance voice recognition technology would form a core part of the new iOS 5 operating system. The new technology is reportedly already in use in the NC data center, both at a hardware and software level although details on what it is being used for are a little sketchy.
The article suggests that Apple is establishing this technology partnership as a key part of their data center for a number of reasons:
“First, Apple will be able to process this voice information for iOS users faster. Second, it will prevent this data from going through third-party servers. And third, by running it on their own stack, Apple can build on top of the technology, and improve upon it as they see fit”
It is unclear at this stage how the implementation of the technology fits in with Apple’s acquisition of Siri, the personal organizer application. However, it’s worth speculating that many of the features that are core to the Siri app could appear in the next version of the iOS operating system which is expected to be previewed at the WWDC event, the same event at which the Nuance/Apple partnership is due to be announced.
Hearing The Voices…