Edible Apple

9to5Mac follows up their report on iOS 5’s “Assistant” app with detailed information regarding how Apple plans to implement voice recognition functionality into the next major iOS release. As has been alluded to previously, Apple plans to use Nuance’s speech recognition engine and here is how Apple plans to implement it based on data strings 9to5Mac discovered in an iOS 5 internal settings menu.

From the strings above, we can deduce that Apple will include a system wide dictation key on its virtual keyboard to begin the dictation process.

This button is referred to the “start” button in the above code snippet. After the start button is clicked, a microphone screen will popover and when the user is done, they can double tap that new microphone view and the speech will be translated into text and the touch keyboard will return.

Now as to how fast this whole process is, if Apple’s implementation is anything like Nuance’s Dragon Dictation App our excitement level has increased 10 fold.

It took me a while to place him, but Michael Thompson, the Senior VP of Nuance’s mobile division looks strikingly similar to Ethan Hawke.

Anyone else see it?