Apple Acquires AI Startup Voysis; Aims To Improve Natural Language Recognition For Siri

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Cupertino giant Apple is busy buying startups. Recently, it acquired the popular hyper-local app Dark Sky. Today, Bloomberg reports that Apple purchased the AI startup Voysis.

The company is an Artificial Intelligence startup, which could be crucial for Apple in improving Siri’s capability of understanding natural languages. According to the report, the Irish AI startup has been on its toes, enhancing digital assistants in applications to understand more advanced requests better. Based on the startup’s official website (now removed), the technology could trim down product search results by processing shopping terms and phrases.

Voysis offered this Artificial Intelligence to other businesses so they could integrate it on their respective voice assistants and apps. The system of Voysis uses Wavenets, which was developed by Google DeepMind a few years ago. In 2018, Voysis founder Peter Cahill noted that the company was able to shrink its system, and once the AI is trained, the software only utilizes as little as 26 MB of memory.

The LinkedIn bio of Voysis reads, “At Voysis, we believe voice will soon be the first point of contact between ‘man’ and machine. We believe that voice-driven natural language interfaces will change the way people interact with consumer and enterprise facing applications by creating more intuitive, efficient, and personalized experiences. We believe Voysis is the complete voice AI platform that will play a key role in bringing about this change.”

According to the publication, Voysis could be crucial to Apple to improve its digital assistant’s understanding of natural language. Also, the Cupertino tech giant could offer Voysis’ platform to developers who integrate with Apple’s Siri. These are mere speculations since Apple has not disclosed its plan with Voysis, although Siri is a standard fit.

Since it was first introduced in 2011, Apple has incrementally advanced the speech output of Siri. More so, when Apple rolled out the iOS 13. In its most recent build, Siri not only sounds more human but is also smarter in recognizing natural language commands. This could be due to the massively improved backend processing.

However, Siri is a work in progress and still needs a lot of things to be perfect. The Cupertino tech giant’s acquisition of Voysis could be the start of a long journey for the company in terms of developing a human-like interface.