While Apple has been expected to release an iOS 7 Gold Master on or around September 10th for a while now, to coincide with their iPhone media event on the same day, a new email leaked by Nuance Communications (the company who provides the speech recognition technology for Apple’s Siri) all but confirms the matter.
The full email can be seen in the shot above, as posted by developer Owen Williams (via Pocket-Lint). The full text is as follows:
Dear NDEV Developer,
As you are probably aware, iOS 7 GA [general availability] will be released on September 10th. The NDEV Program has pre-qualified that SpeechKit 1.4.5 works properly on iOS 7, but we encourage you to conduct your own testing to ensure that when the upgrade happens, your Nuance speech services continue to work seamlessly. Please report any difficulties you experience via our support page.
Given the close relationship between Apple and Nuance over Siri, this is about as close to confirmation of a September 10th release as we’re going to get, short from hearing it directly from Apple – at least, assuming that the e-mail is authentic, and that Nuance actually has such information. It’s also possible, as noted by Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch, that the “GA” mentioned in the email is just a mistaken reference to the rumored iOS 7 Gold Master release on September 1oth.
At any rate, it’s an interesting find – and the fact that it references that same date as Apple’s all-but-confirmed iPhone media event is worth noting. Are you ready for some iOS 7 action?
