Apple acquires Silk Labs

Apple’s HomePod is a distant third behind Amazon and Google when it comes to market share for smart speakers that double up as home hubs, with less than 5 percent share of the market for these devices in the U.S. And its flagship personal assistant, Siri, has also been determined to lag behind Google when it comes to comprehension and precision. But there are signs that the company is intent on doubling down on AI, putting it at the center of its next generation of products, and it’s using acquisitions to help it do so.

Apple has quietly acquired Silk Labs, a startup based out of San Francisco that had worked on AI-based personal assistant technology both for home hubs and mobile devices. There are two notable things about Silk’s platform that set it apart from that of other assistants: it was able to modify its behavior as it learned more about its users over time (both using sound and vision), and it was designed to work on-device — a nod to privacy and concerns about “always on” speakers listening to you, improved processing on devices and the constraints of the cloud and networking technology.

Silk Labs first product was originally conceived as integrated software and hardware: the company raised just under $165,000 in a Kickstarter to build and ship Sense, a smart speaker that would provide a way to control connected home devices and answer questions, and — with a camera integrated into the device — be able to monitor rooms and learn to recognize people and their actions.

Silk Labs announced that it would shelve the Sense hardware to focus specifically on the software, called Silk, after it said it started to receive inquiries from OEMs interested in getting a version of the platform to run on their own devices (it also raised money outside of Kickstarter, around $4 million). Potentially, Silk could give those OEMs a way of differentiating from the plethora of devices that are already on the market.