Apple and its sudden decisions to acquiring Startups - They just acquired Speech Technology Startup VocalIQ, a company based in United Kingdom.
According to VocaIQ's website, they have been developing a self-learning dialogue API built on 10 years of natural language research, belief tracking, decision making and also messaging generation. We learnt that this acquisition would help improve Apple's speech recognizing software SIRI, although this is still based on assumption as Apple made an official statement confirming the acquisition and not telling why...
Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.
VocalIQ isn't just a technology for Smartphones as we've also learnt they specialize in in-car applications and home devices which we all know the smartphone giant Apple are still working earnestly to accomplish.
VocalIQ has criticized Siri in a past blog post, calling the virtual assistant a "toy" unable to understand context. The difference between VocalIQ's system and traditional speech-recognition services like Siri and Cortana is its ability to learn.
The reason for this state of affairs is that while Apple, Google and the some others have mastered how the use machine learning for speech-recognition, they are still stuck with medieval approach when it comes of conversational voice dialog. They are still using pre-programmed flow-chart based response that don't learn.Obviously even if Apple would finally use VocalIQ to improve SIRI, it's going to be an update push to iOS devices and we doubt if it'll make it to iOS 7.1. What do you think ?
The consumer demand for a self-learning multi-domain conversational voice system where consumers can freely talk about movies, restaurants, music, hotel bookings and the meaning of life, is huge and undeniable. The first one to meet that demand will rule the smartphone and wearables market for the next decade.
