14 DAY TRIAL // Apple’s rumored deal with Nuance, a company with an impressive portfolio in voice recognition technologies, is all but confirmed according to those who’ve tested out the latest OS X 10.7 Lion builds.
Seeded to developers late last week, Mac OS X 10.7 Preview 3 is the latest beta of Apple’s forthcoming Mac OS scheduled to debut next month.
Mac OS X Lion contains key elements from the iPad version of iOS. One example is Launchpad, an all-apps view style that supports multi-touch gestures like swiping to go through the multiple pages of installed apps on a computer.
As opposed to Preview 2, which saw very few additions, Developer Preview 3 packs an extensive array of new features and enhancements, including new speech technology powered by Nuance, according to developer reports.
Earlier this year, Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak mistakenly confirmed Apple’s talks with Nuance to use their speech technology during a televised interview.
Although Apple was reluctant to confirm its discussions with the voice recognition expert, evidence of a licensing agreement to use their technology has emerged in Mac OS X Lion.
According to developers, Lion’s system preferences now includes several new voice options with accents ranging from French, to Romanian and Thai that are almost identical to those found in Nuance’s RealSpeak text-to-speech solution.
But the evidence comes from the fact that each voice preference costs $45 and is purchasable from (you guessed it) Nuance.
Apple is also rumored to have acquired Siri, a location-based ‘personal assistant’ that makes searching for services and goods more intuitive, through speech and smart search algorithms.
Siri learns the user’s preferences over time, and is most likely going to be coupled with Nuance speech tech for integration with iOS 5.
The final solution will reportedly be a map-based, voice-powered all-in-one search tool.
To handle the tens of millions of iTunes accounts out there, Apple will reportedly leverage its vast data center located in North Carolina.