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Look Out, Nuance: Apple's Office Near MIT Is Stocking Up With Speech-Tech Talent

Posted by Unknown on from the siri-replace-team dept.

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."

5 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. They need help with Siri by smooth+wombat · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
    1. Re:They need help with Siri by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 5, Funny

      And here's my favorite.

      "Siri, I'm bleeding really bad, can you call me an ambulance?"

      "From now on, I'll call you 'An Ambulance'. OK?"

      (This was apparently changed in one of the updates.)

      This may be speech recognition, but it isn't any sort of content recognition. It's just pattern matching, and only those patterns which the coders have anticipated.

  2. All speech recognition from Boston... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    yeah, that's gonna work out well.

  3. Speech engineering... in *Boston*?! by Theaetetus · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?"

  4. Re:Apple Maps mark 2? by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.