Apple has snapped up a Seattle-based startup in an effort to get smarter about artificial intelligence – for just a mere $200 million...
According to Recode, the company is buying Turi – an AI start-up – which grew out of the GraphLab open-source project.
The Seattle based project is popular with companies such as Pandora, which use it's software to power recommendations.
The collaboration seems to confirm the company's interest in focusing on computer learning and artificial intelligence, such as it's Siri personal assistant function.
Turi is expected to remain in Seattle and will be led by Carlos Guestrin, the Amazon professor of machine learning at the University of Washington.
The purchase of Turi comes as the company's CEO Tim Cook spoke about the importance of machine intelligence in the company's most recent earnings call.
"We have focused our AI efforts on the features that best enhance the customer experience," Cook said.
"For example, machine learning enables Siri to understand words as well as the intent behind them. That means Siri does a better job understanding and even predicting what you want, then delivering the right responses to requests."
While other companies have made advances in AI, Apple has stuck with it's Siri model for a while.
But does this latest investment mean a new bot may be on the cards?
