Do you agree with Evan when he says that Apple needs to give Siri an upgrade? If so, you're in luck, because Apple has reportedly acquired a speech recognition company for that very purpose.
A new report from TechCrunch claims that Apple acquired Novauris Technologies last year. Novauris was a speech recognition company that consisted of employees that hard worked at Dragon Systems R&D U.K. Ltd., the British subsidiary of speech recognition firm Dragon Systems.
Novauris's apps and services supported several languages and could perform tasks like searching on-device content, giving navigation instructions and seeking out items in an app store. It's said that Novauris joined Apple last fall and has been working on improving Siri ever since.
Siri has been an official part of iOS since she debuted with the iPhone 4S in late 2011, and before that she was a standalone app that was bought by Apple in mid-2010. Apple has improved Siri since her launch, giving her the power to do things like change device settings, but it's starting to feel like the iOS assistant is lagging behind Google Now and Cortana in terms of functionality.
We haven't heard of any Siri-specific enhancements that are coming in iOS 8, but with the news of Apple's acquisition of Novauris, hopefully some new Siri features will be included with the next major update to Apple mobile platform. iOS 8 is expected to be announced at WWDC 2014 in early June.
UPDATE: Apple has issued a comment to Re/code saying that it "buys companies from time to time." However, it didn't elaborate any further on Novauris or its deal.
Via 9to5Mac, TechCrunch, Re/code
