Apple and Artificial Intelligence

Some follow up to Marco arment’s piece likening Apple’s fate to BlackBerry’s due to gains in the field of artificial intelligence by competitors. Apple sure does seem to be taking AI seriously, if we can believe the latest speculation and possible leaks.

First is a piece by Brian Roemmele, “Apple’s Secret AI Technology: Meet Vocal IQ the self learning technology that is a part of Siri2”:

There is a narrative that Apple has not understood AI very well. I assert this is based upon not understanding a number of remarkable acquisitions. It started with Siri, Emotient and Perceptio, VocalIQ and perhaps a number of not yet disclosed AI acquisitions.

And he links some of the company’s latest advances to their purchase of Vocal IQ in late 2015:

VocalIQ built astounding technology that no doubt you and I will use every day, some day soon.

More chatter… From Ben Bajarin:

Tease to our voice assistant study coming out next week. More people have/are using Siri than any other voice assistant.

And from The Information, Apple is opening Siri via a forthcoming software development kit (SDK) and creating a product not unlike the Amazon Echo.

So… all this adds up to us waiting to hear more from Apple. Meanwhile, the entire Internet has moved on, for worse.

Categories    Apple    Technology