Apple Acquires AI Voice Startup Voysis to Make Siri Better Understand Our Queries

This seems to a week total of acquisitions for Apple. The company acquired well-known weather condition app Dark Heaven only a couple of days agone. Now, Bloomberg reports that Apple has picked upwards AI vocalism startup Voysis that could assist make Siri better at understanding the user'south natural language.

Siri may be great at answering your basic questions, ranging from time and weather to the distance to the moon. But, it lags considerably behind the likes of Google Banana or Amazon Alexa. The latter two take taken a massive atomic number 82 over other vocalization assistants in the market.

Only, Apple tree is now looking to play catch and brand Siri more competent and intuitive to the user's commands. And information technology seems like the company thinks that Dublin-based Voysis could be helpful in giving Siri that boost – the feature set required to compete with its rivals.

In an official statement, the Apple spokesperson did non confirm the acquisition and merely said, "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally practise not discuss our purpose or plans." The Voysis website is offline and its social handles have also been taken down, and then there'due south no way for us to independently verify the acquisition.

Voysis was founded by Noel Ruane and Peter Cahill effectually 8 years ago, dorsum in 2012, to build a voice-driven natural language platform that businesses could integrate into their platforms. The visitor wanted to fix itself apart from Assistant and Alexa by offering an accurate respond to queries like "I want to buy an LED Telly for 600 euros. Suggest me the best options," said Cahill in a 2017 interview.

Every bit for the engineering science behind Voysis's voice-based AI platform, the company taps into WaveNet, which is an AI-driven method for more than natural human-like speech synthesis. This engineering was first adult past Google's Deepmind segmentation back in 2016 and Voysis managed to "shrink its arrangement to the point where, once the AI is trained, the software uses as little equally 25 megabytes of retentiveness." This would take fabricated running AI operations on the smartphone itself less of a chore.

In that location's nonetheless a couple of months to become for this twelvemonth's WWDC, and so allow'south hang tight and come across whether Apple announces new voices or features for Siri during its iOS xiv presentation at the online-just event.