Apple Acquired Speech Recognition Company Novauris to Improve Siri

Apple has reportedly acquired Novauris, an automatic speech recognition company which grew our of Dragon Systems, reports TechCrunch.

The company was founded in 2002 and was managed by Yoon Kim (CEO), Melvyn Hunt (Co-founder) and John Bridle (Co-founder). Apple reportedly acquired the company last year.

Novauris actually began operations in March 2002, after reassembling almost all the former Dragon Systems U.K. R&D team. Founder Jim Baker funded the initial development work and originally owned the company, but Bridle and Hunt bought him out along with some help from private investors in September 2004. They then brought on Kim, who had been heading up TTS company NeoSpeech, as CEO. The acquisition apparently took place last year, but had not been announced. At Apple as of last fall, the team is now working on improving Siri, the speech-based virtual assistant technology that comes pre-installed on Apple’s mobile devices.


TechCrunch contacted Novauris' U.K. headquarters and co-founder Hunt answered the phone, "Apple". He confirmed that he and team work for Apple and that Novaruis was no longer an active entity. Apple also issued its typical 'confirmation' on the acquisition saying, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

Novauris's main software product, NovaSystem, is a server-based distributed speech recognition system, capable of handling multiple simultaneous voice access requests, and, if required, spreading the computational load over a multi-computer installation. The underlying NovaSearch technology is also suited to embedded applications.

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