Today Apple posted a job listing for an “iOS Speech SW Application Engineer.” The job involves working with the iOS Applications Framework Team in “a fast paced environment with rapidly changing priorities.”

Earlier this year I coined the term “No rest for the RESTful” to dramatize how new tools and API’s to support agile programming would accelerate application development and service delivery. As we enter 2011, the mantra appears to be “Speech is Sexy,” as evidenced not just by Apple’s “Help Wanted” posting, but by Google’s recent acquisition of Phonetic Arts and rapid-fire refinement of mobile user interfaces from Nuance, Vlingo (powered by AT&T’s Watson Engine), Google and Microsoft/Tellme.

The big difference in 2011 is that speech is getting more pervasive while, at the same time, it is being subsumed into multimodal user interfaces. Microsoft, for instance, continues to call speech recognition “foundational” to its user interface but, with the introduction of Kinect, already puts much more emphasis on accurate recognition of gestures. Last year Google’s Mike Cohen explained his objective of making speech as an alternative “every time” a keypad or keyboard is used on a mobile device.

2011 will be a year for smoothing out some of the rough spots in speech enabling the user experience. Candidates include better (more accurate) recognition, noise cancellation, more “human sounding” text-to-speech rendering, speech-to-speech translation, low-latency interaction with dynamic data “in the cloud,” and (to keep things safe, secure and personalized) voice biometrics-based authentication or ID proofing.

But there’s been a fundamental change. I used to write about the “Voice User Interface.” In the coming year attention will be on the “Mobile User Interface” that includes voice. That’s why it should not be a surprise to see that the the speech software engineer at Apple should be prepared to work on a “team” to accommodate the “rapidly changing priorities.”

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, user experience, Apple, Mobile Speech Apps