Apple Acquires Machine Learning Startup Inductiv to Improve Siri

Thursday May 28, 2020 1:37 am PDT by Tim Hardwick

Apple has bought Inductiv Inc., a Canada-based machine learning startup, to work on Siri, machine learning and data science, reports Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.

siri waveform

The engineering team from Waterloo, Ontario-based Inductiv joined Apple in recent weeks to work on Siri, machine learning and data science. Apple confirmed the deal, saying it "buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

Besides staff LinkedIn profiles, the startup doesn't have an online presence, but according to the report, the outfit has developed technologoy that uses AI to identify and correct errors in data, which is important for machine learning and belongs to the field of data science.

Apple has previously hired knowledgeable people in the field, including dozens of engineers from consulting firm Silicon Valley Data Science in 2018. Apple is understood to be upgrading the technology that powers ‌Siri‌ and other AI-related products and services.

As Gurman notes, Apple has acquired several other AI and data companies in recent years, including, Tuplejump, Laserlike, Turi and Perceptio. Just this year the company bought Voysis to improve ‌Siri‌'s speech recognition, virtual reality startup NextVR, and popular weather app Dark Sky.

Tags: Siri Guide, Apple Acquisition

Top Rated Comments

otternonsense

44 months ago

Too little too late. It's a disgrace that Siri is the very first "smart" assistant to hit the market and it's still as dumb as a bag of dongles.

In my case it cannot even register basic commands like "call dad" when I invoke Siri on the watch, and it constantly pops up at random giving me irrelevant song lyrics or "sorry could not find anything about.." just by picking up random phrases while I'm talking to people.

The only "improvement" Siri has received over the years was poaching Workflow and turning it into 'Shortcuts".

Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)

itsmilo

Make siri multi lingual already. Every time I get an iMessage in English to my AirPods I just wanna either die or laugh when it tries to pronounce it the German way.

one of my board games came with a google home and its miles a head of siri. Even the voice sounds more natural and don’t come at me with all the privacy restrictions limiting Siri. If I decide to buy a SMART speaker that LISTENS to me, I guess I am fine with the privacy part anyway.

also the few times I try to send a message with Siri, I spent more time correcting her mistakes than just typing the whole message out myself in the first place

Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

AgentOSX

I would be happy if they could just make the home automation voice commands reliable with any of my HomePods. The Siri on those is beyond terrible.

Voice commands never work until 5 minutes after I use the Home app on my iPad/iPhone and the devices are on.

Score: 1 Votes (Like | Disagree)

CordovaLark

At this rate Bixby has bypassed Siri.

drlamb

Oh my god. I've commented before on having to factory reset my homepods (Stereo pair) to delete an alarm that Siri was adamant wasn't on.

I figured I'd trust Siri again with my alarm this morning but then changed my mind and set an alarm on my iPhone instead. It went like this:

Me: "Hey Siri, turn off my 4am alarm"

Siri: "Okay, your 4am alarm is now off."

4am: Right homepod starts going off. *WTF*

Me: "Hey Siri, STOP!"

Left homepod: "There's nothing playing here!"
Right homepod: Still going off.

It took me shifting over in bed towards the right homepod to get it to turn off. So much for the new update being better.

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