Apple Acquires AI Voice Startup Voysis to Make Siri Better Understand Our Queries

Apr. 4, 2020

This seems to a week full of acquisitions for Apple. The company acquired well-known weather appDark Skymerely a couple of days ago. Now, Bloombergreportsthat Apple has picked up AI voice startup Voysis that could help make Siri better at understanding the user’s natural language.

Siri may be great at answering your basic questions, ranging from time and weather to the distance to the moon. But, it lags considerably behind the likes ofGoogle Assistant or Amazon Alexa. The latter two have taken a massive lead over other voice assistants in the market.

But, Apple is now looking to play catch and make Siri more competent and intuitive to the user’s commands. And it seems like the company thinks that Dublin-based Voysis could be helpful in giving Siri that boost – the feature set required to compete with its rivals.

In an official statement, the Apple spokesperson did not confirm the acquisition and simply said,“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”The Voysis website is offline and its social handles have also been taken down, so there’s no way for us to independently verify the acquisition.

There’s still a couple of months to go for this year’s WWDC, so let’s hang tight and see whether Apple announces new voices or features for Siri during its iOS 14 presentation at the online-only event.