14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has acquired automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology company Novauris Technologies, according to several reports which include statements from one of the company’s representatives.
Emerged from Dragon Systems R&D U.K. Ltd., a voice dictation pioneer, “Novauris had been developing its own large-vocabulary, automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology for access to information stored locally on mobile devices or remotely on servers, which they patented in the U.S. and abroad, and licensed to major corporations worldwide,” according to TechCrunch.
In other words, Siri is on track to get a new upgrade, making the assistant smarter and more able to process requests from users of different ethnicities.
Apple has confirmed the acquisition with its usual statement, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” This is pretty much all the confirmation you need to figure out what the company’s plans with Novauris are.
The acquisition is not reflected on the Novauris website. However, the company’s co-founder Melvyn Hunt reportedly answered the phone and “confirmed that he and the team now work for Apple, and that Novauris itself is no longer an active entity.” The company’s assets will therefore be transferred entirely to Apple.