When Siri was first announced, Apple made a pretty big deal about it and its capabilities, but unfortunately Siri never did quite live up to all the hype. Apple has made quite a ton of improvements over the years, but in the meantime Apple’s competitors have since managed to get ahead of them with services like Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.
That being said, it seems that Apple is still trying to improve upon Siri because in a report from TechCrunch, Apple has confirmed that they have recently acquired a company called Lattice Data. If you’re unfamiliar with the company, we guess you can’t be blamed, but basically Lattice Data is a company that relies on AI to help understand “dark” data, such as images and text.
The report from TechCrunch claims that Apple paid around $200 million for the company, which compared to other acquisitions isn’t really that big a sum. It is unclear as to what Apple plans to do with the acquisition, but reports are claiming that Lattice has been approaching companies to help enhance their AI assistants, which has led to speculation that the acquisition could be about enhancing/improving Siri.
Apple is rumored to debut their own Siri-powered set of speakers next month which will compete against the likes of Google Home and the Amazon Echo series of smart speakers.
Filed in . Read more about AI (Artificial Intelligence), iOS and Siri.