One of the major rumors for iOS 5 that failed to materialize at Apple's WWDC keynote yesterday was new voice features from Nuance and Siri. The rumors had pegged iOS 5 as receiving significant integration of voice recognition capabilities, potentially handing off much of the processing for that functionality to its new North Carolina data center.
Apple's keynote was of course devoid of any talk of voice recognition features in iOS 5 or any other Nuance-related announcements, leading to questions about where things stand with the rumor. TechCrunch now revisits its earlier claims, noting that such a deal may still be in the works for iOS 5 but that it simply wasn't ready to go in time for WWDC.
We're still looking into this, but here's the latest we're hearing. At least three of our original sources on this were "very surprised" not to hear anything during the keynote today. One noted that leading up to the last minute, they were sure new, elaborate voice features in iOS 5 were going to be announced on stage. It didn't happen. Apple has been known to pull things at the last second. But this may go deeper.
The report goes on to speculate about whether public disclosure of the Nuance-Apple negotiations may have derailed things somewhat, given the reputations of Apple and Nuance both as hard negotiators.
In suggesting that the Nuance integration may still be in the works, the report also points to a few circumstantial pieces of evidence, including the presence of Nuance's chief mobile platform architect at the WWDC keynote and a brief on-stage demo from Apple's Roger Rosner, who is believed to be heading up the Nuance/Siri work at Apple and who may have had a last-minute change in topic after the Nuance integration was deemed not ready for public consumption.
Update: As noted by several readers, Apple's slide showing a host of iOS 5 features that were not prominently discussed during the keynote does make mention of several features related to VoiceOver and text-to-speech: "Option to speak text selection", "VoiceOver item chooser", and "VoiceOver action support". It is unclear if these are the rumored Nuance features or if the integration is truly a more substantial effort, which should include speech recognition beyond that already utilized in Voice Control on iOS.
Friday December 12, 2025 10:56 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Macworld's Filipe Espósito today revealed a handful of features that Apple is allegedly planning for iOS 26.4, iOS 27, and even iOS 28.
The report said the features are referenced within the code for a leaked internal build of iOS 26 that is not meant to be seen by the public. However, it appears that Espósito and/or his sources managed to gain access to it, providing us with a sneak peek...
Monday December 15, 2025 3:05 pm PST by Juli Clover
Software from an iPhone prototype running an early build of iOS 26 leaked last week, giving us a glimpse at future Apple devices and iOS features. We recapped device codenames in our prior article, and now we have a list of some of the most notable feature flags that were found in the software code.
In some cases, it's obvious what the feature flags are referring to, while some are more...
Monday December 15, 2025 2:05 pm PST by Juli Clover
Last week, details about unreleased Apple devices and future iOS features were shared by Macworld. This week, we learned where the information came from, plus we have more findings from the leak.
As it turns out, an Apple prototype device running an early build of iOS 26 was sold, and the person who bought it shared the software. The OS has a version number of 23A5234w, and the first...
The first foldable iPhone will feature a series of design and hardware firsts for Apple, according to details shared by the Weibo leaker known as Digital Chat Station.
According to a new post, via machine translation, Apple is developing what the leaker describes as a "wide foldable" device, a term used to refer to a horizontally oriented, book-style foldable with a large internal display....
Monday December 15, 2025 4:23 pm PST by Juli Clover
Apple is testing iOS 26.3, the next version of iOS 26 that will launch around January. Since iOS 26.3's testing is happening over the holidays, it is a smaller update with fewer features than we've seen in prior betas.
We've rounded up what's new so far, and we'll add to our list with subsequent betas if we come across any other features.
Transfer to Android
Apple is making it simpler...
Friday December 12, 2025 10:10 am PST by Juli Clover
Apple today released iOS 26.2, the second major update to the iOS 26 operating system that came out in September, iOS 26.2 comes a little over a month after iOS 26.1 launched. iOS 26.2 is compatible with the iPhone 11 series and later, as well as the second-generation iPhone SE.
The new software can be downloaded on eligible iPhones over-the-air by going to Settings >...
Thursday December 11, 2025 8:49 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple seeded the second iOS 26.2 Release Candidate to developers earlier this week, meaning the update will be released to the general public very soon.
Apple confirmed iOS 26.2 would be released in December, but it did not provide a specific date. We expect the update to be released by early next week.
iOS 26.2 includes a handful of new features and changes on the iPhone, such as a new...
Monday December 15, 2025 7:41 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Apple released the AirPods Max on December 15, 2020, meaning the over-ear headphones launched five years ago today. While the AirPods Max were updated with a USB-C port and new color options last year, followed by support for lossless audio and ultra-low latency audio this year, the headphones lack some of the features that have been introduced for newer generations of the regular AirPods and the ...
I think the best we can guess is simply that we know Apple will have a new iphone out later this year and they will want some special features to hype it up. My guess is it will be this voice integration as the better cpu processing will help tremendously with this.
I have my doubts that this was some last minute breakdown in negotiations.
All of Android's voice recognition depends on Google servers for the heavy lifting; the phones are not able to do it themselves. The phone does a bunch of compression / feature-extraction on the audio, uploads the result of that, and Google sends back what it thinks was actually said.
I hope the weather widget can be chosen not to be the standard wether app. Coz its horrible in my country...
What's that old joke about the Netherlands... "If you don't like the weather, wait an hour"? ;)
I seriously doubt you'll be able to add a different widget. The screenshots showed the little Yahoo! logo in the corner, so the data is almost certainly still coming from The Weather Channel / weather.com.
That said, there was mention of other long-overdue improvements to the weather app -- namely, hourly forecasts, and showing weather for your current location (instead of forcing you to lookup and add it manually, finally!) -- so who knows, there might be other possibilities in store.
I noticed in one of the slides yesterday with the other features of iOS 5 was "Option to speak text selection". Maybe this is proof Apple is improving its speech-to-text capabilities?
One of the major rumors for iOS 5 that failed to materialize at Apple's WWDC keynote yesterday was new voice features from Nuance and Siri. The rumors had pegged iOS 5 as receiving significant integration of voice recognition capabilities, potentially handing off much of the processing for that functionality to its new North Carolina data center.
