Close on the heels of its acquisition of start-up Mapsense, Apple has snapped-up yet another start-up - Perceptio.
On Monday, Oct. 5, Apple confirmed that it had acquired Perceptio, which is a start-up that develops technology to aid companies run cutting-edge AI systems on smartphones.
The AI systems developed by Perceptio focus on the running it on the device itself rather than the offsite server.
The news comes courtesy of a Bloomberg report, which cited the confirmation from Apple's spokesperson Colin Johnson. The terms of the deal and the sum for which Apple has acquired Perceptio is not known.
"Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," said Johnson.
What Apple intends to do with Perceptio's technology in its kitty is not clear. However, it is presumed that since the start-up specialized in the field of deep learning for photo classification, Apple could utilize this technology in its future devices. Perhaps an iPhone 7 that can sort your pictures on its own with a little help from Siri?
Apart from Perceptio, Apple has also taken on board the company's co-founders Nicolas Pinto and Zak Stone who are AI researchers. The two have been fashioning AI software which is able to not only recognize, but also classify photos without delving into masses of data. This system will be a departure from the current image recognition systems which bank on the Internet, cloud computing and offsite servers for the purpose of identification and classification of images.
Perceptio's plans to create techniques that will aid in running AI image-classification systems on a smartphone without drawing from external data sources will go hand-in-glove with Apple's approach as the latter is constantly trying to reduce the customer data usage.
Last week Apple acquired VocalIQ, a UK-based start-up which created AI technology that can enable virtual assistants such as Siri to have longer conversations.
With Apple seemingly on a roll to boost its AI functionalities with a slew of acquisitions, it would seem that the next-gen iDevices would capitalize on the technology.
