This probably explains why Apple had stationed Jerome Belegarda and his team of spoken language group focus on distributed speech processing for quite some time.
This makes sense in light of the Siri acquisition. Siri relied heavily on Nuance tech. They were both SSRI alumni.
Apple seems to be "friending" SSRI for AI tech.
The Nuance of today has little to nothing in common with the post-acquisition Nuance. It's really name-only at this point. Some of their speech technology has been incorporated into the Nuance 9 engine. There are some profesional services employees and perhaps a few product engineers. Most of the speech engine developers quit and tried to join Yahoo (http://news.cnet.com/Yahoo-accused-of-poaching-speech-engine...).