Despite the fact that Siri is one of the oldest assistants on the market, at Apple it seems that they don't know how to sharpen it so that it becomes a useful assistant on a day-to-day basis. A proof of the difficulties that Apple has encountered along the way is found in the Shortcuts application, but that could change in the future, hopefully not too far away.
The Cupertino-based company has bought the artificial intelligence company Voysis, whose technology is likely to is used to enhance Siri and its natural language, according to the guys at Bloomberg. This Dublin-based company creates artificial intelligence technologies that listen to and translate the human voice.
Apple has confirmed the acquisition of this company, through its typical statement "We buy small technology companies from time to time and generally, we do not discuss our purposes or plans." But you don't have to be very smart to add 2 plus 2 to deduce that Apple will integrate the Voysis code into Siri so that you are able to answer more specific questions.
One of the key characteristics that differentiates Voysis from other Artificial Intelligence programs is its small footprint on the device, that is, the space it occupies. Once the AI is trained, it only occupies about 25 MB, this would allow Apple to execute a greater number of processes on the device without requiring a data connection, the same thing that Google currently offers with the Pixel 4, where the Google assistant it does not need an internet connection to function.
During these last years, Apple has lagged behind Google and Amazon, despite being one of the first companies to launch a virtual assistant, a fact that seems to have now begun to worry Tim Cook's company and is shown by the latest purchases he has made, purchases related to artificial intelligence companies (Emotient, Turi, VocalIQ and Xnor.ai) in addition to confirming the intention of the company to enter the segment of cheap and functional speakers, such as Amazon's Echo range.