It is no secret since TechCrunch broke the news recently, but Apple has hidden the acquisition of Novauris Technologies (an automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology company) that took place last year in September.
The drumbeats of rumours in the corridors assume that Apple wants to save Siri, trapped in the fire of fierce competition, by improving its skills.
The Cupertino-based tech company has to come with a better pitch for its babbling digital personal assistant Siri, now that Microsoft has presented a serious contender, dubbed as Cortana, to the world.
Novauris, which has high profile customers including Samsung, BMW Panasonic and Verizon Wireless, seem to be the right folk for this job. The company, founded in 2012 by ex-experts from British voice and dictation software firm Dragon Systems, is well known for its “NovaSearch”, a sophisticated technology that can grab the meaning of up to 100 000 items despite unorganized utterances.
Apple previously failed to acquire ‘Nuance’, a firm which simply owns the technology that currently feeds Siri. The purchase of Novauris guarantees the tech behemoth strong in-house competence to continually pamper its personal assistant, in order to fend off growing competition from Microsoft and Google.
Besides being compatible with Apple’s iOS, the applications and services crafted by the acquired company have also championed in an array of languages from Korean to Brazilian Portuguese. Other skills include abilities to search on-device content thoroughly (apps, contacts and music among others) and to look for information in a device’s App Store as well.
While Apple neither confirmed nor denied the acquisition of the company to TechCrunch, Novauris Technologies, which is established in the UK, cleared all doubts with an affirmative answer.
The next iPhone is expected in September 2014, let’s hope that Siri tells another tale to convince Apple’s users of its superiority over arch-rivals!
Source: TechCrunnch, The Next Web
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