Look Out, Nuance: Apple's Office Near MIT Is Stocking Up With Speech-Tech Talent

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's had a small, very secretive office in Cambridge, MA for a few months now. And we finally know what they're doing: Building a team that works on speech technology for Siri. Sure, it's interesting for Apple to have a remote engineering team. And hiring from MIT is a no-brainer. But here's why this is a bigger deal: Apple has always relied on Nuance, a Boston-area company, for the speech-recognition technology behind Siri. By branching out with its own speech team — stocked with former Nuance scientists, no less — Apple could very well be signaling a move away from relying on Nuance for this core technology. And the speech wars are just heating up: Microsoft and Amazon both have speech engineering offices in the Boston area too."

Re:Apple Maps mark 2?

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Case in point. Most human readers would have no problem recognizing that you meant "going it alone", where a machine translator would be stripping its gears. And that's just for WRITTEN TEXT. Now compound the problem with each individual speaker's timbre, inflection and personal idiosyncratic verbal tics. It's HARD to wreck a nice beach.