One of Apple’s acquisitions last year went unnoticed until now, as TechCrunch reports the company purchased automatic speech recognition company Novauris Technologies in 2013. The company’s main product is NovaSystem, a server-based distributed speech recognition system.
MacRumors reports that the company’s website says the technology handles multiple simultaneous voice requests, obtaining better speech recognition by recognizing complete phrases, and analyzing syllable structure.
“NovaSearch doesn’t carry out recognition at the word or sequence-of-words level, but rather identifies complete phrases from start to finish by matching them against a potentially huge inventory of possible utterances. This enables it to assemble information about what has been spoken over utterances of virtually any length and take near-optimal decisions.”
The Novauris website doesn’t mention it’s acquisition by Apple. However, a TechCrunch phone call to the U.K. offices of the firm was answered with “Apple,” by the company’s co-founder, who confirmed that the firm now belonged to Apple.
Novauris’s founders formerly worked for Dragon Systems, the developer of Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is now owned by Nuance.
Novauris should be a true asset to Apple as they work to improve their Siri digital personal assistant. The company operated in both the embedded and server space, owning the core engine of the technology.
The Nouvaris technology has been used by companies such as Panasonic, Samsung, Alpine, and others to power various voice-activated mapping systems.
