This article was published on April 3, 2014

Apple has reportedly acquired speech recognition company Novauris Technologies


A woman displays “Siri”, voice-activated

A woman displays “Siri”, voice-activated assistant technology, on an Apple iPhone 4S in Taipei on July 30, 2012. Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University has filed a suit against US tech giant Apple, claiming the company’s Siri intelligent assistant has infringed on two of its patents. AFP PHOTO / Mandy CHENG (Photo credit should read Mandy […]

Image Credits Credit: AFP

Apple is looking to improve its Siri voice-recognition assistant through the acquisition of Novauris Technologies, according to TechCrunch. The deal appears to have taken place last year.

Novauris had built a technology called “NovaSearch” that processed voice input at the phrase level, rather than a word or sequence-of-words. It is capable of matching up data in a set of over 245 million items without having to track grammar.

Former Novauris CEO Yoon Kim now works as a manager on Apple’s Siri team, according to LinkedIn. Novauris had close ties to Dragon Systems, which produced the speech recognition system that Nuance now uses.

Speech Recognition Pioneer Novauris Bought By Apple, Team Now Works On Siri [TechCrunch]

Image credit: AFP / Getty Images

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