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| iPhone 5 Nuance Voice Recognition Rumor Is Merely a Catch-up To Android Posted: 13 Jun 2011 10:25 AM PDT
iPhone 5 news leads off this week with a fresh rumor that one of the most solid iPhone hardware upgrades — an 8 megapixel camera — may now be a no-show on this year’s iPhone iteration. To be sure, if Apple passes on the 8 megapixel camera upgrade, scores of iPhone users will be disappointed, since an improved camera array is something that has been highly anticipated since the start of the iPhone 5 hype cycle. Tech writers are attempting temper this potentially bad news with a new belief that iOS 5 — and the iPhone 5 by extension — will feature Nuance voice recognition technology. Ironically, however, voice recognition is already standard on many of this year’s Android phones (as is an 8 megapixel camera for some premium models), meaning that both of these features are mere catch-ups to what is already being offered in the smartphone marketplace. When are we going to hear about a novel, new feature for the iPhone 5? Michael Ide at ITProPortal wrote today that “A leak of the internal build of the iOS 5 platform has indicated that the iPhone might soon get voice recognition features powered by Nuance” and that “The evidence of voice recognition feature was not discovered on the iOS 5 beta build that is available to developers, but in the internal iOS 5 build that is meant for trusted Apple employees working on the OS.” To be sure, the addition of Nuance for the iPhone 5 would be a welcome addition for iPhone users since, although many smartphone users claim to love the touchpad and loathe QWERTY keyboards, few smartphone users would dare claim that typing on the iPhone is a fluid, enjoyable act. The prospect of speaking text messages, search queries, and other actions into the iPhone 5 would indeed lend a more fluid, next-generation input and control method for iPhone users. The thing is, Android is already doing this. As Michael Ide stipulates in his article, “One screenshot allows users to activate Nuance Diction and Nuance Long Endpoint features. The other screenshots show options that allow users to activate the Nuance voice recognition by pressing the space bar or by clicking the 'microphone' icon right next to the space. If the 'microphone' icon sounds familiar it’s because a similar icon can be found on Android devices.” Anyone out there who is multi-platform like me and has recently invested in an Android phone has had a chance to use Google’s own experimental voice recognition technology. And you know what — it’s pretty good. I’ve found it to be especially helpful for text messages — and I find that Google gets my words right about 95% of the time (and I usually leave in the malformed errors, since they’re often hilarious). The only problem is that Android’s version of voice recognition doesn’t pick up on punctuation or inflection, so it cannot really distinguish between a question or statement, nor can it add caesura to a sentence. If Nuance can pull this sort of thing off effectively (and one would hope so, given the name “Nuance”), then at least Apple could claim to have a better use of voice recognition technology. But as I said before, even if the iPhone 5 ends up getting both Nuance and an 8 megapixel camera, these are only catch-up features. What will the iPhone have that will truly make it stand out from Android? Anyone? Anyone? |
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