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Apple acquired speech recognition company Novauris last year to improve Siri

natural_languageApple has acquired Novauris Technologies, a company with a lot of talent in the automatic speech recognition field, according to a report from TechCrunch. The purchase of Novauris Technologies actually happened sometime last year, and the team is now at Apple working to improve speech recognition features of Siri. A quick look at CEO Yoon Kim’s LinkedIn page shows that the company likely joined Apple in September of last year.

The company is actually made up of former Dragon Systems R&D team members, a company with notable history in the voice dictation and speech recognition fields.

Apple quietly acquired an automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology company called Novauris Technologies, which grew out of Dragon Systems R&D U.K. Ltd., the British research subsidiary of Dragon Systems, a well-known voice dictation pioneer. Founded in 2002, the company was currently being managed by Yoon Kim (CEO), Melvyn Hunt (Co-founder) and John Bridle (Co-founder), whose backgrounds include work at Dragon, Nortel, SRI (which helped to birth Apple acquisition Siri), Marconi and Aurix.

Novauris offered server-based and embedded speech recognition systems to OEMs and had teamed up with Panasonic, Verizon Wireless, Samsung, BMW and others in the past to integrate the tech in smartphones and other products.

Apple hasn’t commented on the acquisition, but TechCrunch was able to get confirmation from co-founder of Novauris Melvin Hunt that the team is now working at Apple .

Update: Apple gave Recode its usual “Apple buys companies from time to time” confirmation of the deal.

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Comments

  1. moofer1972 - 10 years ago

    Am I the only one that can’t stop reading “Norovirus” every time I see that company’s name?

  2. I don’t think it’s so much of the speech recognition that’s an issue, but the context of what it recognizes. Try saying a phrase wrong and results are all over the place.

  3. krikaoli - 10 years ago

    So far 2 years… I’ve lost my faith to see Siri speaking Portuguese.

  4. zBrain (@joeregular) - 10 years ago

    siri needs to be “bilingual”. it is annoying to not get results when i say, “play <insert spanish song title or latin singer/band here", or during a trip to berlin, "where is bahnhofstrasse".

Author

Avatar for Jordan Kahn Jordan Kahn

Jordan writes about all things Apple as Senior Editor of 9to5Mac, & contributes to 9to5Google, 9to5Toys, & Electrek.co. He also co-authors 9to5Mac’s Logic Pros series.