Apple on Wednesday has confirmed its acquisition of Laserlike, a Silicon Valley startup that develops machine learning system for content discovery, according a recent report by The Information. Apple took over the startup firm in late last yearbut went unreported until now.
Terms of the deal as well as purpose of the takeover were not clear, but Apple might possibly be using Laserlike’s work to enhance Siri’s capabilities to deliver better personalized results for users.
Active for about four years, Laserlike, for its assumption of users not getting results as per their interest using usual search sources, focused on an interest search engine that could gather immense amount of information from across the web, then deliver specific results based upon the interests of a user through its app which could then browsed like news and could be shared on social network sites via an in-app “inbox”.
Laselike’s technology, whose app is no longer available, could be used to recommend users, on the basis of their browsing habits, to visit additional sites.
Apple could use the Laselike’s work and its staff to increase its own machine learning efforts in general and specifically Siri, which draw the criticism for being lagging behind the AI assistants from Google and Amazon. Apple’s privacy stance also resulted in weaker performance of Siri as AI assistant from rival are leveraged of being connected with huge amounts cloud data, an opportunity in which Siri lacks as it relies on and give priority to on-device processing.
Laserlike’s team has reportedly been working with Apple’s AI division led by Senior VP John Giannandrea, who was hired away from Google last year. AI division of the Apple oversees the company’s strategy for AI and ML across all of the company’s products and also develops Core ML and Siri, and now having Laserlike’s team as part of that unit, Apple could using it to improve long-troubled ability of Siri to collect relevant information from the web.
