Source: http://ift.tt/29HRNL2 --- Wednesday, October 04, 2017
Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service — a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions — because the team was (according to a notice on the site) “joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world.” TechCrunch has now learned what that project is: the team is joining Apple. They are becoming a part of the group working on Siri, Apple’s own personal assistant that uses voice-based commands and natural language to answer questions, control your phone and more. To be clear, this is not a straight acquisition, but more of an acqui-hire, so Apple didn’t have a comment to offer along the lines of the one it made last week. Specifically, there is no IP coming over and no indication of whether any parts of its existing services will be used by Apple, and no existing customers. It’s not known exactly how many of the Init.ai team are joining Apple but the startup was not very big — just six people , according to LinkedIn, including co-founders Keith Brisson, Will Dawoodi, Kyle DeTella and Trevor McNaughton. We first heard of the Apple connection via an anonymous tip, and then were able to corroborate the details with a source close to Init.ai and a second source close to Apple. After we started asking around, the notice announcing ...
from Apple http://ift.tt/2hMv2hj
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