The iCloud, Nuance voice-control, and the iPhone 5: A rumor

With iOS 5 on the brink of announcement, and the iPhone 5 rumored to be on the horizon — arriving some time in the fall — it’s no wonder that people are curious about the role that Nuance may have in bringing better voice controls to Apple’s mobile devices, including those that have yet to be announced. The rumor on the street has Nuance and Apple teaming up to bring natural language processing to the iPhones of the future, possibly starting with the iPhone 5.

A quick backstory

Apple, as you may know, purchased Siri around this time last year (April 2010), the application that lets users ask their phone questions, instead of having to type them in with a keyboard. The application would then process the results, and return answers to your questions. If you wanted to know where the closest Starbucks was located, you’d just ask. Pretty neat stuff, and obviously something that many could see as incredibly useful in the future.

Since Apple’s acquisition of Siri, we’ve heard various rumors that Siri-based technologies would find their way into iOS. Most recently these rumors have included inclusion in iOS 5, as well as the iPhone 5 moving forward.

A short time after Apple’s acquisition of Siri last year, Woz let it slip that Apple purchased Nuance. While that particular rumor was debunked and retracted by Woz himself (it was a slip of the tongue), a lot of people began trying to connect the dots between Nuance and Apple. You see, Siri relied on Nuance technologies to process the language and then delegate the information to a growing number of web services, which would then analyze the questions and return surprisingly accurate results.