Apple Purchase of AI Voice Tech Company PullString
The Verge recently reported an acquisition by Apple: "Apple buys AI voice startup that helps companies build Alexa and Google Assistant apps"
PullString has also worked on the enterprise end to help companies build skills and apps for Amazon’s Alexa platform and Google Assistant.
PullString (formerly ToyTalk), began as a company making technology allowing kids to interact with their toys. TechCrunch dubbed them "the startup that mashed together Barbie and the Internet of Things". Digging into IP, PullString actually has a decent patent portfolio. The headline identifies them as a startup, but their patent filings date back to 2012. The portfolio is not giant, but has some international spread across a few families:
US: 5 granted and 4 pending
EPO: 2 pending
China: 2 pending
...as well as filings in Brazil, Canada, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Mexico and Taiwan.
Family size can sometimes be an indicator of a valuable technology. The biggest family in this portfolio is entitled: "Systems and methods for interactive synthetic character dialogue"
...the system includes a plurality of interactive scenes in a virtual environment. A user may access each scene and engage in conversation with a synthetic character regarding an activity associated with that active scene. In certain embodiments, a central server may house a plurality of waveforms associated with the synthetic character's speech, and may dynamically deliver the waveforms to a user device in conjunction with the operation of an artificial intelligence. In some embodiments, speech is generated with text-to-speech utilities when the waveform from the server is unavailable or inefficient to retrieve.
It will be interesting to watch future patent filings from Apple with PullString inventors to see where they take the technology. Co-founders Oren Jacob (CEO) and Martin Reddy (CTO) currently appear as inventors on the most patents, followed by VP of engineering, Lucas Ives.
For more on the technology, check out this podcast from Cognilytica with PullString CTO Martin Reddy: The Three Fallacies of Conversational AI