Apple acquires an artificial intelligence startup called Turi for $200 million

The AI space is heating up. The newest announcement ( via Geekwire) in the space comes from Apple as it acquires artificial intelligence startup Turi for $200 million. This ensures Apple is at par when competing with Google, Facebook and Amazon. Apple, which is known to buy smaller companies and not disclose much, reportedly put out its standard statement, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” said Apple in a statement. Turi has several developer tools that help build AI solutions. However, it isn’t clear whether it’s the tools or talent that Apple targets with this acquisition. The Turi team will be working from Seattle. This acquisition doesn’t come as a surprise as Tim Cook had discussed a shift to newer techs like artificial intelligence and augmented reality during the company’s earnings call. However, it should be noticed that it isn’t the first-ever AI-based acquisition as Apple has previously bought Perceptio and natural language-processing company, VocalIQ. In a  letter to employees, Sundar Pichai had said earlier this year that Google also wants to have seamless integration across all of its services, so that users can easily move from one to the other. More services will be powered by neural networks and machine learning. AI implementation in Google Services means that the experience for the users will keep getting better with use.