Apple Acquires Artificial Intelligence Startup Perceptio

Another day, another acquisition. Apple has purchased Perceptio, an artificial intelligence startup. The news comes just days after reports that the company had purchased another artificial intelligence startup called VocalIQ.

Not much is known about Perceptio, as the company doesn't even have an official website and even an official LinkedIn entry. As per the the individual personal Twitter and LinkedIn profiles of Nicolas Pinto and Zak Stone, founders of Perceptio, Pinto is a research scientist and computer science lecturer at MIT and Harvard. Stone holds a PhD in computer vision from Harvard. Pinto and Stone have previously worked together to create a photo sharing app called Smoothie.

Apple confirmed the purchase of Perceptio to Bloomberg, with its usual boilerplate statement. "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

Perceptio allows phones to do advanced calculations without storing user data in the cloud. Apple's interest in the field is not surprising, as the company has long been trying to make its iPhone and iPad models capable enough to do all the processing work on the device itself, bolstering the privacy aspect of its devices.

This is the second acquisition Apple has made this month. The company announced earlier this month that it has acquired VocalIQ, a UK-based startup that builds speech processing technology. The firm is developing technologies to enable more human-like and natural communication between machines and people.

The buyouts of speech and AI startups suggests that the company has plans to make Siri, the digital voice assistant in iOS-powered devices as well as Apple Watch and Apple TV, more capable.