If you've ever wondered how Siri does what she does, aside from her being "magical", Nuance has confirmed that Apple uses Nuance speech recognition in its virtual assistant.
When Apple showed off Siri to the world at the iPhone 4S launch it not only created a new category that its rivals would follow in, it let people speak, be understood, and answered by software on a smartphone in a way that was easy for everyone to understand. There were speech recognition softwares before Siri, but the way Apple presented it made everyone take notice.
Apple has never acknowledged how Siri got her voice, but it has been widely suspected that Nuance had a little something to do with it. Nuance never commented on the chatter, until today. While speaking at AllThingsD, Nuance CEO Paul Ricci confirmed that his company is present in giving Siri her voice. He said, "We are the fundamental provider of voice recognition for Apple."
He confirmed what many have been thinking, but made sure to give Apple the credit for making Siri the virtual assistant millions of people have come to know. He explained that Nuance only handles the voice recognition side of things and not Siri's artificial intelligence layers, that's Apple. He also revealed that Siri has embedded and cloud technology for voice recognition.
Nuance also makes its own cross-platform voice recognition apps and also works with some of Apple's rivals like Samsung. After Apple introduced Siri to the world, its rivals believed that virtual assistants were going to be the next big thing. Samsung soon followed up with its own Siri competitor in its S-Voice application. Google followed by adding Google Now to Android when it released Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Nuance does not provide Google Now with its voice recognition software.
When asked about the future of voice recognition, Ricci explained that the next two years would see more cross platform virtual assistants. We are already seeing this with Google Now being released for iOS. Ricci went on to explain the one critical point that keeps many from making a great virtual assistant: "creating a virtual assistant that can understand what the user wants and take action based on anticipating those needs."
So now you know how Siri does what she does, hopefully with iOS 7, she'll be able to mature a little and do more.
