As a general rule we don’t cover rumors here on the site. Every now and then however there is a bit of juicy information that is so deeply rooted in fact that taking the leap toward believing the rumor is pretty easy. This is one of those cases and, truth be told, I have a hard time seeing this NOT come to pass.
We’ve all been hearing about ongoing negotiations between Apple and Nuance with regard to incorporating Nuance’s voice-to-text technology deeply in the next version of iOS. We’ve even see screen shots of the keyboard trigger for it. Now word comes that the functionality has been activated and implemented in some of the current carrier testing versions of iOS 5.0 that is taking place. This means that iOS 5.0 is almost done and that this will be turned on when the new operating system arrives, at least for some carriers.
None of this is a surprise. I’ve been using iOS 5.0 Beta on a number of my devices and the current build is rock solid. (And the iCloud implementation for savings and sharing documents is… WOW!!) In addition, we know that Apple is looking to beef up its voice to text recognition and the only real player whose technology is worthy of Apple’s polish is… Nuance. It isn’t a great leap to see this coming into play soon.
One comment in a post I read referred to this voice-to-text system working in a similar manner to the one Google has implemented in Android. It may do so from a mechanical perspective but there is going to be one huge difference here – Nuance’s a voice to text recognition rocks while Google’s still leaves much to be desired. In fact, I have used Nuance’s T9 Trace keyboard on every Android device I have owned because Google’s V-to-T is so weak. As Thomas put it, my days trying to find an Android device I like may be officially over if this actually comes to pass. (And yes, I dictated this using Nuance is dictation app for the iPhone.)