Is a Nuance and Apple deal in the works?

This is nothing new... Let's not forget Steve Wozniak's blunder last year where he claimed Apple had already purchased Nuance.

Apple's acquisition or partnership with Nuance would be great news, enhancing and filling out the already advanced accessibility of OS X and iOS with Speech recognition and a more accessible OCR engine.

I hope this leads to better integration of voice command services in iOS 5.

I currently carry a 3GS. Before that I had a Samsung Instinct - a pre-Android pseudo-smartphone that badly failed to imitate what the original iPhone was doing.

One area where that phone really had the iPhone beat (and still does) was voice command integration. On that phone, I could push a single button, say "find gas station", get a list of the nearest options based on my GPS location and have the option to call or get turn-by-turn text-to-speech navigation to that destination.

With my iPhone, I can get all that information, but it's not the seamless experience that I enjoy with virtually any other function on Apple products. With my old phone I could stop at a traffic signal, perform the search and have GPS navigation loading up by the time the light turned green. Siri is the closest I get to that experience on an iPhone, but getting directions in the Maps app is inferior to turn-by-turn voice directions in that kind of situation.

Apple really has to do something about Voice Recognition in iOS. It is very lacking in many places, especially on the iPad which requires Jailbreaking to enable.

As it is, I have a couple of blind friends and can't recommend an iOS device to them because the Voice Control is so poor.

"Perhaps with the release of iOS 5 we'll be talking to our phones more than using them to talk to people."

That isn't nearly as disturbing as when the phones start talking to US. Probably not too far off either...iOS 6 maybe?

Nuance sucks. I don't know how they have not come under the scrutiny of the FTC. They literally bought ALL the other dictation software and technology that existed. Do a search, you will find no other choice but Nuance. And they have done little to no advancement of the technology, just raking in the cash because they are the only option. Now they are working on doing the same thing for OCR.

Nuance also owns arguably the most powerful OCR engine in the world in OmniPage, which could have other implications such as the iPhone dictating emails as well as OCRing a document after taking a picture of it. You could then copy & paste the text into anything else or creating a new document with some of the copied text.

It's also possible the Nuance deal will have larger implications on Macs in general now that Apple is working on blurring the line between iOS and OS X.

Does anyone else think that a deal that Apple is just now working out can have absolutely nothing to do with the OS that they're going to talk about and release to developers in about a month.