Apple in Negotiations with Voice Recognition Company Nuance

[Maura]

MacRumors reports that according to TechCrunch, Apple is said to be currently in talks with the company responsible for the Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice recognition engine, Nuance Communications. According to the report, Apple’s talks with Nuance are less likely to mean that Apple wants to acquire Nuance, and more likely to mean that Apple wants Nuance as a partner to help it bring voice recognition on a significant scale to iOS 5. Clearly, this is something that Apple is very interested in integrating into iOS, either with iOS 5 or in the very near future, having also last year acquired Siri, a company whose personal assistant software is driven by Nuance’s voice recognition technology. According to TechCrunch, Nuance holds the patents for several important components of voice recognition technology, so Apple would need to do some sort of deal with them if it wanted to use similar technology or to develop its own.

Source: Apple Negotiating Deal With Nuance for Speech Recognition in iOS 5? - Mac Rumors