Rumors suggest that Apple has acquired a startup by the name Silk Labs which works on artificial intelligence (AI)-based personal assistant technology meant for smartphones and smart home devices.
A report in The Registrar suggests that this acquisition has been quietly-done for an undisclosed sum with the aim of strengthening Apple’s AI capabilities for smart home devices. The report added that Silk Labs has about a dozen employees and has raised approximately $4 million (roughly Rs. 28 crores) in funding.
TechCrunch suggested that Silk Labs is the brainchild of Andreas Gal and Michael Vines, who are the former CTO of Mozilla, and also responsible for creating the mobile platform Firefox OS and another employee of Qualcomm respectively.
Amazon and Google accounted for about 70 percent share of the global smart speaker shipments in the first quarter of 2018, wherein Apple sold about 600,000 HomePods during that period.
A market research firm Strategy Analytics reported that global smart speaker shipments reached 9.2 million units in the first quarter of 2018.
