It’s all well and good being able to call upon your own pocketable Siri butler, but I don’t remember Bruce Wayne’s buddy Alfred relying on a Wi-Fi or mobile data connection before he could stitch up his crime-fighting boss. Apple’s aware of the limitations that a mandatory web connection brings to Siri functionality, and it seems to be looking to rectify it with a new purchase.
It’s snapped up a company called Novauris, speech recognition specialists whose team has historically worked on the patents and tech that sits at the heart of Siri.
While it’s not yet clear what Apple has got the Novauris team working on, the voice control gang is known for its work with locally-processed speech commands. With Apple’s Siri relying largely on remote servers to process commands, it would appear then that it’s looking to improve Siri’s offline capabilities. With Apple’s recent Carplay push set to be heavily reliant on voice input and internet connections out on the open road sporadic at best, on offline version of Siri is more important to the company than ever before. [TechCrunch]
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