Why didn't we see a Nuance announcement during WWDC?

Do we really need more invasive chatter? Especially when it is unnecessary. In public please use your keyboards.

It's was there.... sort of. 1:16:14 in the 200 new features slide, in small print above "Mass Configuration", "VoiceOver action support".

Would part of the Nuance deal have made the new "read aloud" feature available in iBooks?

It might not have been discussed verbally but the slides behind the guy presenting iOS 5 at WWDC (sorry, forget his name) had a lot of 'smaller' features surrounding a giant iOS 5 icon at one stage. One of them says "Option to speak text selection" -- I believe there's your Nuance feature right there. Text to speech.

On this page http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#accessibility Apple mentions that:

"In addition to the 23 built-in voices in Lion, you can download higher-quality versions of the languages from VoiceOver Utility. Choose Customize from the Voice pop-up menu in the Speech pane."

Could this maybe be related to the Nuance technology?

Apple usually only rolls out / announces features when they're steps away from perfection. And here's the thing, if no one's beating their door down about it there's no sense even talking about it.

I was more shocked that Apple didn't boast about getting all the music labels to buy into the iCloud while both Amazon and El Goog are working their service sans the music industry's support.

I for one probably won't even use it. I don't even like speaking my selections when I call to pay bills so I doubt I'll even use any voice commands / gestures in iOS or Lion.

I have a feeling that they may be making this feature hardware-accelerated with a custom chip of some sort, a chip which will only appear in the new iPhone 5. Either that or they've found that it slows the 4 down too much, and so it'll only be available on the faster A5 chip in the upcoming iPhone 5.