iOS 5 beta shows off speech-to-text feature

Are you excited about the impending release of iOS 5 beta? If that is the case, then be prepared to get all the more excited, with adrenaline coursing through your body. Why do we say so? Well, Apple might have touched a little on the iOS 5′s features when WWDC 2011 happened, but they certainly played their cards close to their chest, and recent findings point towards Apple working on integrating Nuance’s text-to-speech features into iOS 5 – as you can tell from the screenshot above.

A new button has magically sprung up on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard overnight, just like mushrooms after rain, which shows off a microphone – something that was not there in the first place. Pressing it will direct you to a new display that shows off an even larger microphone. That would be your cue to speak, with iOS 5 doing its bit to get the speech-to-text working just fine. Hopefully it is sensitive enough to recognize a wide variety of accents, considering how the world is a global village now.