Apple has acquired the machine learning company Laserlike.
The acquisition of the four-year-old tech startup, located in Silicon Valley, was confirmed by Apple in a statement.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in a press release today.
According to the Laserlike website, their core mission is to “deliver high-quality information and diverse perspectives on any topic from the entire web to you,” and that they have “built a web-scale content search, discovery and personalization platform using advanced machine learning.”
“We live in a world of information abundance, where the main problem is sifting through the noise and discovering the stuff you actually care about,” the firm says on its about page.
“For instance, if you care about knowing when the next SpaceX livestream launch is because you like to watch it with your kids, or if the car you bought two years ago has had a recall, or if a company you’re interested in announces it’s opening a new office where you live, or if there’s a music festival coming to your town, you don’t know when to look for these things, and there’s no product that informs you automatically.”
“This is one of the things we want to fix on the Internet. Laserlike’s core mission is to deliver high-quality information and diverse perspectives on any topic from the entire web. We are passionate about helping people follow their interests and engage with new perspectives.”
Although Apple often acquires new companies for talent, patents or slithers of their ideas, it is thought that Laserlike could help to strengthen Apple’s artificial intelligence efforts, including its Siri virtual assistant, which many have criticized when compared with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, which today offer better user experience and more functionality.
iOS 13, due later this year, may include more advancements in Siri, and Apple’s acquisition of Laserlike, which was actually completed in 2018, may give them more ideas and technology to play with, and add new strings to Siri’s bow.
Last year, the company added Siri Shortcuts, allowing users to program their own routines based on applications and voice commands via Siri.
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