Apple has announced that it has made one more acquisition in the artificial intelligence (AI) space - Voysis, a Dublin, Ireland based startup that has developed the technology to grasp people’s language even when they speak in their native accent.
The company has been already working on improving that way digital assistants respond to customer’s voice commands. Many online platforms have embedded AI-based voice assistants on their sites to help customers quickly search for the products they want to buy on their sites. The voice assistants developed by Voysis can quickly narrow down the selection criteria and take the customer to the appropriate page.
If a person were to be looking for a refrigerator and has a budget of say $400, he or she has to just say it “I need a fridge” and “my budget is $400”. Now irrespective of the style in which the language is spoken the voice assistant is capable of grasping it. This is part of the machine learning exercise where the multiple possibilities of pronunciation of words are inputted and the bot made to understand and act. Voysis claims its app is quite light occupying as little as 25MB in space and has been developed on Wavenets.
Apple has since acquired Voysis, but the transaction value has not been disclosed. This is possibly the fourth such startup working on AI that Apple has taken over. The previous ones are Turi, Xnor.ai and Laserlike.
Incidentally, many of these startup entrepreneurs work on such new technologies with the ultimate knowledge that their startup will get acquired by a larger company. They will earn a lot of money with which they will float another startup in one more area of technology. This is a healthy system for technology as well as the economy.
Voysis, founded in 2012 has received funding to the extent of $8 million from Polaris Partners in 2017. The venture has its operations in Edinburgh and Boston. It will become an Apple company now and will be deployed in improving the performance of SIRI.