Apple has announced the acquisition of the Irish voice tech company, Voysis, for a better understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP). The Dublin, Ireland-based company focuses on improving the digital assistant of online shopping applications. It intends to enhance the functioning so that software could respond in a better way to the voice commands from the users.
A spokesman from Apple said, “the company buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
The co-founder of Voysis, Peter Cahill said in 2018 that his company managed to shrink the system to the point where, once the AI is trained, the software uses as little as 25 megabytes of memory. It made it easier to run on smartphones without any internet connection.
Voysis had developed a voice recognition platform driven by natural language instructions and search capabilities. It is also extremely good at recognizing and responding to voice commands from the users. Though the company has been working on improving the voice assistants for online shopping apps, it is still not sure of how Apple will directly leverage the technology of Voysis.
Apple can make the use of acquired know-know and improve Siri’s understanding of natural language. Or the iPhone maker can extend the Voysis platform to its developers who are already working on the digital assistant of Apple. Also, Apple has been the top buyer of AI startups and some of its recent buys include Turi, Xnor.ai, and LaserLike.
Voysis is the second acquisition of Apple for this week. Apple also picked up a popular weather app, Dark Sky and promptly announced the closing of its Android version soon.