Apple may wean away from licensing Nuance's services for Siri, instead creating an in-house speech recognition solution which will be used to power the virtual assistant in the future. The move comes weeks after it was revealed by The Wall Street Journal that Samsung was possibly looking to acquire Naunce. According to Wired, Apple has already hired several experts in this field, including Nuance's former vice president of research Larry Gillick, and is said to be looking for more candidates in its bid to create a team of researchers to work on technologies like speech recognition, deep learning and neural networks.
"Apple is not hiring only in the managerial level, but hiring also people on the team-leading level and the researcher level," says Abdel-rahman Mohamed, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto, who was courted by Apple.
While an in-house speech recognition engine may power Siri in the future, the upcoming version of Siri in iOS 8 will still utilize Nuance's voice recognition engine. The iOS 8 update includes new features like hands-free voice activation, music recognition via Shazam, streaming voice recognition and more.
What features would you like to see in future versions of Siri?
Source: Wired
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