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Look Out, Nuance: Apple's Office Near MIT Is Stocking Up With Speech-Tech Talent
An anonymous reader writes "Apple's had a small, very secretive office in Cambridge, MA for a few months now. And we finally know what they're doing: Building a team that works on speech technology for Siri. Sure, it's interesting for Apple to have a remote engineering team. And hiring from MIT is a no-brainer. But here's why this is a bigger deal: Apple has always relied on Nuance, a Boston-area company, for the speech-recognition technology behind Siri. By branching out with its own speech team — stocked with former Nuance scientists, no less — Apple could very well be signaling a move away from relying on Nuance for this core technology. And the speech wars are just heating up: Microsoft and Amazon both have speech engineering offices in the Boston area too."
Voice wecognition on that thing is terrible. Wook.
Siwi, can you wecommend a westauwant?
I'm sorry, Bawwy. I don't understand "wecommend a westauwant."
Wisten to me. Not "westauwant," *westauwant*.
I don't know what you mean by "not westauwant, westauwant."
See? Total cwap. You suck, Siwi.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The juxtaposition of your post (and the topic in general) and sig have me ROFLing.
yeah, that's gonna work out well.
And the speech wars are just heating up: Microsoft and Amazon both have speech engineering offices in the Boston area too.
"Siri, wheah's a wicked good place to pahk neah the Gahden?"
It was on their last conference call that they believe it is very important. That's going to involve a lot of voice interaction.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I often wonder if Google Voice's transcription service for voicemail is a way for Google to get people to provide them with voice-rec feedback. They have those buttons to allow Google to use individual voicemail messages and transcripts to "improve" their service. You can bet they've got an angle.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Case in point. Most human readers would have no problem recognizing that you meant "going it alone", where a machine translator would be stripping its gears. And that's just for WRITTEN TEXT. Now compound the problem with each individual speaker's timbre, inflection and personal idiosyncratic verbal tics. It's HARD to wreck a nice beach.
The speech work is being done in Boston because - they figure if Siri can correctly interpret words spoken by a Bostonian, it'll have no trouble with folks who speak actual English.
#DeleteChrome
The real powerhouse in speech recognition tech isn't MIT -- it's BBN, at the other end of Cambridge.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Oh give it a fscking rest.Apple Maps works just fine. The 3D viewing mode, in particular, is smoother and easier to interpret than Google Earth, more useful for an overview than StreetView, and easier to navigate than either of those two. Complaining about Maps today is like whining that the MacBook Air doesn't include an optical drive. It marks you as a deluded fool, lost in the past and determined to find something to hate about Apple, regardless of facts or reality.