Apple has acquired Siri, a mobile “assistant” app maker, a Siri representative has confirmed. Siri is sort of a to-the-point, mini search engine or we can let them describe themselves: “You can ask Siri to find a romantic place for dinner, tell you what’s playing at a local jazz club or get tickets to a movie for Saturday night.”
So, in a sense, Apple just got into the search business. A territory owned by Google. Basically, how Siri differentiates itself from a normal search engine is that it connects to APIs across the web to bring you the search result on your query. This eliminates the to scrape and index the web.
Neither Apple or Siri disclosed the terms of acquisition (read: we have no idea how much Apple paid for the acquisition). However, Business Insider guesses the amount to be anywhere between $100-$200 million.
The acquisition was listed in a Federal Trade Comission document as a deal granted early termination under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act.
Siri’s executive team consists of CEO Dag Kittlaus, VP of Engineering Adam Cheyer, CTO Tom Gruber, and VP Product Gummi Hafsteinsson (an ex-Google employee) – all industry veterans of the telecom, mobile, AI, and semantic technologies.
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