Apple has Acquired Dublin's 'Voysis,' a next-gen Conversational AI Platform
Apple has acquired Dublin based Voysis, a conversational AI platform that enables third parties to integrate high quality voice and natural language capabilities into their products. Voysis was founded in 2012 by Peter Cahill & Noel Ruane. The company is headquartered in Dublin, Leinster, Ireland, with additional office in Edinburgh, Scotland and Boston, Massachusetts.
The company's LinkedIn bio reads as follows: At Voysis, we believe voice will soon be the first point of contact between ‘man’ and machine. We believe that voice driven natural language interfaces will change the way people interact with consumer and enterprise facing applications by creating more intuitive, efficient, and personalized experiences. We believe Voysis is the complete voice AI platform that will play a key role in bringing about this change."
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While their website is now non-functional, we were able to find a rare video about a Voysis Retail Demo. YouTube has forced us to link to their site by making their video embed code non-functional. In the past when Apple acquired a company, online videos usually disappear within 24 hours after the acquisition.
In Bloomberg's report on Apple's latest acquisition they wrote: "Voysis’s system taps into Wavenets, an AI-based method for creating more human-like computer speech that was first developed by Google’s DeepMind in 2016. Voysis co-founder Peter Cahill said in 2018 that his company managed to shrink its system to the point where, once the AI is trained, the software uses as little as 25 megabytes of memory -- about the same size as four Apple Music songs. That made it much easier to run on smartphones without an internet connection.
Apple could use the acquired know-how improve Siri’s understanding of natural language or to offer the Voysis platform to thousands of developers that already integrate with the Apple digital assistant. Apple has been the top buyer of AI startups in recent years and has a portfolio that already includes former startups including Turi, Xnor.ai, and Laserlike."
Patently Apple reported on the Znor.ai acquisition back on January 15, 2020. We also pointed to a series of other Apple acquistions regarding AI back in 2017.
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