One of the major rumors for iOS 5 that failed to materialize at Apple's WWDC keynote yesterday was new voice features from Nuance and Siri. The rumors had pegged iOS 5 as receiving significant integration of voice recognition capabilities, potentially handing off much of the processing for that functionality to its new North Carolina data center.
Apple's keynote was of course devoid of any talk of voice recognition features in iOS 5 or any other Nuance-related announcements, leading to questions about where things stand with the rumor. TechCrunch now revisits its earlier claims, noting that such a deal may still be in the works for iOS 5 but that it simply wasn't ready to go in time for WWDC.
We're still looking into this, but here's the latest we're hearing. At least three of our original sources on this were "very surprised" not to hear anything during the keynote today. One noted that leading up to the last minute, they were sure new, elaborate voice features in iOS 5 were going to be announced on stage. It didn't happen. Apple has been known to pull things at the last second. But this may go deeper.
The report goes on to speculate about whether public disclosure of the Nuance-Apple negotiations may have derailed things somewhat, given the reputations of Apple and Nuance both as hard negotiators.
In suggesting that the Nuance integration may still be in the works, the report also points to a few circumstantial pieces of evidence, including the presence of Nuance's chief mobile platform architect at the WWDC keynote and a brief on-stage demo from Apple's Roger Rosner, who is believed to be heading up the Nuance/Siri work at Apple and who may have had a last-minute change in topic after the Nuance integration was deemed not ready for public consumption.
Update: As noted by several readers, Apple's slide showing a host of iOS 5 features that were not prominently discussed during the keynote does make mention of several features related to VoiceOver and text-to-speech: "Option to speak text selection", "VoiceOver item chooser", and "VoiceOver action support". It is unclear if these are the rumored Nuance features or if the integration is truly a more substantial effort, which should include speech recognition beyond that already utilized in Voice Control on iOS.
Friday January 17, 2025 2:42 pm PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 19 is still around six months away from being announced, but a new leak has allegedly revealed a completely redesigned Camera app.
Based on footage it obtained, YouTube channel Front Page Tech shared a video showing what the new Camera app will apparently look like, with the key change being translucent menus for camera controls. Overall, the design of these menus looks similar to...
Thursday January 16, 2025 6:45 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple today adjusted estimated trade-in values for select iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch models in the U.S., according to its website.
Some values increased, while others decreased. The changes were not too significant, with most values rising or dropping by $5 to $50.
We have outlined some examples below:
Device
New Value
Old Value
iPhone 15 Pro Max
Up to $630
U ...
Sunday January 19, 2025 6:58 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple on late Saturday removed TikTok from the App Store in the U.S., and it has now explained why it was required to take this action.
Last year, the U.S. passed a law that required Chinese company ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok due to potential national security risks, or else the platform would be banned. That law went into effect today, and companies like Apple and Google...
Thursday January 16, 2025 12:39 pm PST by Juli Clover
Apple provided the third beta of iOS 18.3 to developers today, and while the betas have so far been light on new features, the third beta makes some major changes to Notification Summaries and also tweaks a few other features.
Notification Summary Changes
Apple made multiple changes to Notification Summaries in response to complaints about inaccurate summaries of news headlines.
For...
Saturday January 18, 2025 10:28 am PST by Joe Rossignol
iOS 19 will not drop support for any iPhone models, according to French website iPhoneSoft.fr.
The report cited a source who said iOS 19 will be compatible with any iPhone that can run iOS 18, which would mean the following models:
iPhone 16
iPhone 16 Plus
iPhone 16 Pro
iPhone 16 Pro Max
iPhone 15
iPhone 15 Plus
iPhone 15 Pro
iPhone 15 Pro Max
iPhone 14
iPhon...
Friday January 17, 2025 3:38 pm PST by Juli Clover
For the last several months, we've been hearing rumors about a redesigned version of the iPhone 17 that Apple might call the iPhone 17 "Air," or something along those lines. It's going to replace the iPhone 17 Plus as Apple's fourth iPhone option, and it will be offered alongside the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone 17 Pro Max.
We know the iPhone 17 Air is going to be super slim, but...
Sunday January 19, 2025 6:02 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple plans to expand the iPhone's redesigned Mail app to the Mac starting with macOS 15.4, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
The first macOS 15.4 beta should be made available in the coming weeks, and Apple has previously suggested that the iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, and macOS 15.4 series of software updates will be released to the public in April.
The revamped Mail app debuted on all...
Sunday January 19, 2025 8:25 am PST by Joe Rossignol
In September, Apple said that it would be launching Powerbeats Pro 2 in 2025, and it appears the wireless earbuds are coming very soon.
Powerbeats Pro 2 images found in iOS 18 code
In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the Powerbeats Pro 2 are "due imminently." In addition to Apple filing the Powerbeats Pro 2 in regulatory databases last month, Gurman said Apple is...
I think the best we can guess is simply that we know Apple will have a new iphone out later this year and they will want some special features to hype it up. My guess is it will be this voice integration as the better cpu processing will help tremendously with this.
I have my doubts that this was some last minute breakdown in negotiations.
All of Android's voice recognition depends on Google servers for the heavy lifting; the phones are not able to do it themselves. The phone does a bunch of compression / feature-extraction on the audio, uploads the result of that, and Google sends back what it thinks was actually said.
I hope the weather widget can be chosen not to be the standard wether app. Coz its horrible in my country...
What's that old joke about the Netherlands... "If you don't like the weather, wait an hour"? ;)
I seriously doubt you'll be able to add a different widget. The screenshots showed the little Yahoo! logo in the corner, so the data is almost certainly still coming from The Weather Channel / weather.com.
That said, there was mention of other long-overdue improvements to the weather app -- namely, hourly forecasts, and showing weather for your current location (instead of forcing you to lookup and add it manually, finally!) -- so who knows, there might be other possibilities in store.
I noticed in one of the slides yesterday with the other features of iOS 5 was "Option to speak text selection". Maybe this is proof Apple is improving its speech-to-text capabilities?
One of the major rumors for iOS 5 that failed to materialize at Apple's WWDC keynote yesterday was new voice features from Nuance and Siri. The rumors had pegged iOS 5 as receiving significant integration of voice recognition capabilities, potentially handing off much of the processing for that functionality to its new North Carolina data center.
