VocalIQ – and it seems Apple – sees potential for its services in several industries, including automotive, wearables, smart homes, smart devices, robotics and language learning. The foundations of our technologies are based on more than 10 years of academic research at the Spoken Dialogue Systems Group at University of Cambridge, United Kingdom and are driven by a team of world-class engineers, researchers and entrepreneurs.
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In the blog post, VocalIQ says that even though these virtual personal assistants have gotten good at recognising speech, the companies who make them “are still stuck with medieval approach when it comes of conversational voice dialog” because they’re “still using pre-programmed flow-chart based response that don’t learn”. The company provides developers an administration system that helps in adding voice dialogue features to their apps. Apple introduced Siri in 2011, over which it kept on bringing improvements over time periods. Rather than making machines more human like, users have to be more robotic in giving out commands for proper functioning, which easily turned out to be more tedious than what they worth. Siri is already in direct competition with Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Now for the top virtual assistant. For its part, Apple confirmed the deal but made only its usual statement that “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our objective or plans”.
This is not the first time that Apple has taken a step to improve Siri.
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Little else is known about the deal, such as how much Apple paid for the company. Though the company’s spokesperson hasn’t disclosed any detail regarding the acquisition yet, we can imagine the possible, and most probable consequences. This is, therefore, likely to drive speculations about the prospect of Apple using the technology for its long rumored Apple vehicle under the name of “Project Titan”.
