Katie Marsal
Apple has put together a small team of experts in speech recognition technology in Boston, in an effort to bolster its voice-driven Siri personal assistant service.
Details of Apple's hiring push in Massachusetts were revealed on Friday by Xconomy, which discovered a series of online job profiles for the new hires. The details reveal that those personnel brought onto Apple's team are working on the Siri team.
Apple's Boston team is said to have previously worked at a company called VoiceSignal Technologies, which was purchased by Nuance in 2007 for $293 million. Nuance's voice recognition technology is currently used for Siri's language detection capabilities.
But as a third-party company, Nuance also licenses its technology to Apple's competition, including Samsung and Google. It's possible that Apple's voice team in Boston could be an effort by the company to produce its own proprietary technology that wouldn't need to be shared with competitors.
Apple has had an office in Boston's Kendall Square for some time, as the local presence was first revealed by the Boston Globe in January. The office is part of the Cambridge Innovation Center, but its purpose was previously unknown.
Though Apple is still primarily based out of Cupertino, Calif., the company has expanded its American research, development and corporate support presence in recent years with new major operations across the country. In addition to its major operations center in Austin, Tex., Apple also has a chip development team in Orlando, Fla., and a number of fingerprint sensor experts in Melbourne, Fla., along with major data centers in Oregon, Nevada and North Carolina.
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37 Comments
Siri should be taught the following new tricks: -how to work with the headphone button. For all intents and purposes, it's useless via the headphones button, when I ride my bike. The timing is off, that by the time I start speaking the command, I hear the Siri-out tone. Very frustrating! -how to change any setting on the iPhone: ex. turn off/on Wi-Fi, etc.
Well, if they can get Siri to understand a Boston accent, she will be able to understand just about anybody. Except the Scott's. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ
This is the right move for Apple. They tried to buy Nuance, but were unable to.
More importantly, as mobile devices become more powerful, and Apple is able to add increasingly sophisticated special processors to their AX SoCs, the opportunity for better voice support are only increasing.
There's no way Apple could do this with Nuance. SIRI would be much better if it didn't require an always present net connection to work, thus voice recognition on the device is a key future direction.
It's also something that a company like Google will not be able to rip off. (Though they will pretend to have done so, as they always do.)
Voice Recognition is not a trivial problem, either, so dependance on a third party who may not share your priorities for features or concern about quality is even worse than in other cases (like Maps).
Well, if they can get Siri to understand a Boston accent, she will be able to understand just about anybody. Except the Scott's.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ
Be careful insulting the Scots. You'll make an enemy for life
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LnVIo3Bwzs
I hate that Siri takes up the entire screen -- especially when I'm using Maps for turn-by-turn directions.