Mid-June saw a report from The Wall Street Journal claiming that Nuance, the company behind the speech recognition technology that powers Apple’s virtual assistant Siri, was in talks to be acquired by Samsung Electronics. A new report, this time from Wired, says Apple is putting together its own in-house speech recognition team to power future versions of Siri.
Wired, via MacRumors:
“Apple is not hiring only in the managerial level, but hiring also people on the team-leading level and the researcher level,” says Abdel-rahman Mohamed, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto, who was courted by Apple. “They’re building a very strong team for speech recognition research.”
Over the past few years, Apple has hired a number of speech researchers away from Nuance including former vice president of research Larry Gillick. Many of those researchers now work at Apple’s Boston office, which has been rumored to be working on an in-house solution for Siri that will wean the assistant away from Nuance’s technologies.
While it’s true the upcoming iOS 8 version of Siri still includes Nuance technology, Apple does appear to be working to provide its own in-house speech recognition solution for a future version of Siri.
iOS 8, launching this fall, will include new features for Siri, including “Hey Siri” voice activation, Shazam music recognition, improved voice recognition, and more.
