Apple has acquired a company called Novauris, which develops automatic speech recognition technology.
Novauris was founded by several employees from Dragon Systems, a more well-known speech recognition firm. The acquisition took place last year, and Apple would only confirm that it occasionally buys small companies. Novauris told TechCrunch that it is no longer a stand-alone company and now works for Apple.
The company’s main project was to develop a speech recognition system with a large vocabulary that could be stored locally on devices such as smartphones or tablets, as well as operate from the cloud. The acquisition could boost the performance and availability of Siri, Apple’s voice-activated personal assistant.
