A few days ago, Apple acquired the popular weather app Dark Sky. Now it has been announced that this was not the only acquisition. The Irish company Voysis is also now said to belong to Apple.
With the acquisition of Dark Sky, the iOS internal weather app should be significantly better in the future. But there should also be a lot of changes in the Siri area. According to a recent Bloomberg report, Apple has bought the Irish company Voysis. This is a startup that specializes in artificial intelligence. Apple's plan is to improve Siri's ability to understand natural language skills. According to Bloomberg, Voysis teaches digital assistants more advanced queries. The report states that report:
Dublin, Ireland-based Voysis focused on improving digital assistants within online shopping apps so the software could respond more accurately to users' voice commands. A now-removed company website said the technology could narrow down product search results by processing shopping phrases like "I need a new LED TV" and "My budget is $1,000." Voysis has made this AI available to other companies to build into their own apps and voice assistants.
Compared to Siri, Google Assistant now has a considerable lead in the area of natural language understanding and processing. The acquisition of Voysis could significantly improve Siri in the future. The report explains:
Apple confirms takeover
Voysis' system uses Wavenets, an AI-based method for generating more human-like computer speech first developed by Google's DeepMind in 2016. Voysis co-founder Peter Cahill said in 2018 that his company had managed to shrink the system so much that once the AI is trained, the software only uses 25 megabytes of memory - about the size of four Apple Music songs. That made it much easier to run on smartphones without an internet connection.
This is actually remarkable. Apple has already confirmed the acquisition to Bloomberg but has not commented further. What Siri will actually offer us in the coming months and years remains to be seen. (Photo by ismagilov / Bigstockphoto
