Apple acquires AI startup Vilynx for $50 million

Cupertino- based technology giant Apple acquired Barcelona-based Vilynx for $50 million, with the aim of improving the Siri voice assistant built into Apple devices.

Apple acquired the startup that is specialised in advanced artificial intelligence and computer vision technology to help the iPhone maker improve its own ArtificiaI Intelligence across a number of applications and services.

Vilynx developed technology that uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze a video's visual, audio and text content to understand what the video shows. It was using that technology to create tags for the video, making it searchable. Vilynx applied its technology to software that companies used for search and recommendation engines for video and other media. Also, the software could not only recognise items, but also understand them.

In it's defunct website, Vilynx said "Recognition is detecting Michael Jordan's face. Understanding is knowing it's Michael Jordan, the former NBA basketball player who played for the Chicago Bulls and went to the University of North Carolina."

About 50 of the company's engineers and data scientists will remain at Apple, including Vilynx's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Elisenda Bou-Balust. Also, Apple is retaininh Vilynx's Barcelona office and intends to make it one of the company's main artificial intelligence research and development centers in Europe. However, Apple has started hiring engineers for the office and Apple also has AI engineers in Europe in Cambridge, UK, Cork, Ireland, Munich and Zurich.

The deal adds to a growing list of Artificial Intelligence companies purchased by Apple in recent years. In 2020, Apple also acquired Xnor.ai, Inductiv and Voysis to bolster its artificial intelligence efforts.

Apple launched Siri in 2011 and has since expanded AI across its software, including the Camera and Photos apps, battery life optimisation, and facial and handwriting recognition. But while the company has made strides to improve the machine learning technology, the Siri voice assistant is still considered as an inferior to its rivals such as Google and Amazon.

Apple's recent AI-related deals, an increased public presence for the machine learning group, the hiring of new researchers and the appointment of former Google executive John Giannandrea signals apple's effort to make major improvements.

Apple says that it buys smaller technology companies from time to time and hence generally does not discuss their purpose or plans explicitly.

Source - Bloomberg News