Nuance voices found in Lion Developer Preview 3

Yesterday, we told you that Apple had seeded Lion Developer Preview 3 to developers. We noted at the time that among the new features in Developer Preview 3 were a new boot animation, new graphical elements in the Finder's toolbar, new desktop wallpapers and that Reading List is now enabled in Safari. Other details of the latest Lion preview have emerged, but perhaps the most important is that Nuance voices, shown in the image above, have been discovered in the OS itself.

Nuance is, of course, rumored to have entered into a major partnership with Apple for its speech recognition technology being incorporated into iOS 5. But now it appears Apple is going to be pushing speech recognition as a feature across all of its operating systems. As discovered by NetPuting, a quick check of Lion's speech preferences finds that a number of voices from Nuance's RealSpeak Solo software are now integrated directly into Mac OS X Lion.

Earlier today an Apple patent emerged describing a way Nuance-like speech recognition software could be used in iOS to help make it easier for iPhone users to communicate in loud or quiet environments.