Apple’s job listings are usually a good indication of what’s to come and tonight Apple began searching for four engineers with a specific focus on voice technologies in iOS. These four positions (1,2,3,4) break up into an iOS Speech Application Engineer, two Speech Recognition Engineers, and a Senior Speech Research Scientist. With three different job types, all with a focus on voice recognition, Apple appears to be serious about this. What is even more interesting is where Apple wants the potential applicants to have experience. Have you heard of Nuance’s voice recognition software? How about Google’s Voice recognizing Cloud used in Android OS? Well, Apple prefers the engineers working on iOS’s voice recognition to have “demonstrated experience with Nuance Recognizer, IBM WebSphere Voice, Google Voice Search, or similar voice search tools.” You may recall Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak saying something about Nuance’s voice technology in connection to Apple, then denying it, or you may have heard about Apple’s acquisition of Artificial Intelligence company Siri. It seems to all be coming together now. Check out a video of Siri’s voice recognition software running on iPhone for a peek into iOS’s future. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpjpVAB06O4&w=640&h=385]
