Apple buys Israeli startup Q.ai

Posted by ishener 3 hours ago

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https://www.reuters.com/business/apple-acquires-audio-ai-sta...

Comments

Comment by tchalla 1 hour ago

> Notably, this is the second time CEO Aviad Maizels has sold a company to Apple. In 2013, he sold PrimeSense, a 3D-sensing company that played a key role in Apple’s transition from fingerprint sensors to facial recognition on iPhones. Q.ai launched in 2022 and is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Gradient Ventures, and others. Its founding team, including Maizels and co-founders Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya, will join Apple as part of the acquisition.

Twice, well done!

Comment by tartoran 56 minutes ago

What kind of tech does qAi bring to the table?

Comment by causalmodels 37 minutes ago

" As first reported by Reuters, Apple has acquired Q.ai, an Israeli startup specializing in imaging and machine learning, particularly technologies that enable devices to interpret whispered speech and enhance audio in noisy environments."

Comment by cyrusradfar 25 minutes ago

[puts on tin foil]

you mean something that improves the detection and transcription of voices when the person doesn't realize the mic is on, like when it's in our pocket?

Comment by Noaidi 23 minutes ago

Yeah, so, I am never turning on Apple Intelligence...

Comment by yomansat 16 minutes ago

It still surprises me how everyone was closing their Russian based stores when they invaded Ukraine, but here's a much worse situation and it's business as usual...

Comment by myth_drannon 1 minute ago

Maybe because no one has Palestinian based stores?

Comment by Sir_Twist 1 hour ago

“Q.ai is a startup developing a technology to analyze facial expressions and other ways for communication.”

This is an interesting acquisition given their rumored Echo Show / Nest Hub competitor (1). Maybe this is part of their (albeit flawed and delayed) attempt to revitalize the Siri branding under their Apple Intelligence marketing. When you have to say the exact right words to Siri, or else she will add “Meeting at 10” as an all day calendar event, people get frustrated, and that non-technical illusion of the “digital assistant” is lost. If this is the model of understanding Apple have of their customers’ perception of Siri, then maybe their thinking is that giving Siri more non-verbal personable capability could be a differentiating factor in the smart hub market, along with the LLM rebuild. I could also see this tying into some sort of strategy for the Vision Pro.

Now, whether this hypothetical differentiating factor is worth $2 billion, I’m not so sure on, but I guess time will tell.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/05/apple-smart-home-hub-20...

Comment by deepfriedchokes 1 hour ago

Sounds pretty invasive for privacy, if this was ever paired with smart glasses in public.

Comment by Lammy 1 hour ago

Hence the name, I assume.

Comment by cyrusradfar 25 minutes ago

and very expensive domain.

Comment by clueless 1 hour ago

Could Q.ai be commercializing the AlterEgo tech coming out of MIT Lab? i.e. "detects faint neuromuscular signals in the face and throat when a person internally verbalizes words"

Yep, looks like that is it. Recent patent from one of the founders: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

Comment by mikestorrent 1 hour ago

Yeah...

Pardon the AI crap, but:

> ...in most people, when they "talk to themselves" in their mind (inner speech or internal monologue), there is typically subtle, miniature activation of the voice-related muscles — especially in the larynx (vocal cords/folds), tongue, lips, and sometimes jaw or chin area. These movements are usually extremely small — often called subvocal or sub-articulatory activity — and almost nobody can feel or see them without sensitive equipment. They do not produce any audible sound (no air is pushed through to vibrate the vocal folds enough for sound). Key evidence comes from decades of research using electromyography (EMG), which records tiny electrical signals from muscles: EMG studies consistently show increased activity in laryngeal (voice box) muscles, tongue, and lip/chin areas during inner speech, silent reading, mental arithmetic, thinking in words, or other verbal thinking tasks

So, how long until my Airpods can read my mind?

Comment by 54 minutes ago

Comment by concavebinator 40 minutes ago

In case there are any Ender's Game fans here, the capability to understand micro-expressions reminds me of how Ender subvocalizes to Jane. Orson Scott Card predicted yet another technological norm.

Comment by danhite 1 minute ago

[delayed]

Comment by stefanos82 1 hour ago

Why am I having a feeling that one of their reasons was so they can trademark "iQ", to match the iSomething "franchise", so to speak?

Comment by gralab 54 minutes ago

Apple dropped the "i" naming scheme many years ago.

Comment by sgjohnson 37 minutes ago

iCloud, iPad, iPhone, iMac, iMessage, iOS/iPadOS, iMovie?

Granted, they are slowly but surely killing it, but it’s still going quite strong.

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by 3 hours ago

Comment by alecco 40 minutes ago

It's kind of sad watching Apple drift into irrelevancy. I know I'm not going to buy more products from them because nothing they have is worth the premium price.

Comment by assaddayinh 2 hours ago

The ability to impress CEOs and signal hotness to investors, may not corelate at all with the ability to produce breakthrough technology. Thus companies like google grow up unbought to then become ..

Comment by bnchrch 2 hours ago

Wake me up when they let one of these acqui-hires update Siri to be on par with a voice assistant I could make in an afternoon with off the shelf tools.

Comment by alighter 2 hours ago

This. And next word prediction / autocorrect that doesn’t look like it’s from the previous century.

Comment by tobmlt 1 hour ago

On both my nokia and my blackberry it was far far better than on my iphone. That wasn't quite 199X but pretty close.

I wish the iphone had word prediction and autocorrect that was from the previous centruy

Comment by thewebguyd 47 minutes ago

BlackBerry's keyboards & autocorrect were top notch. Nothing has matched it yet when using a pure virtual touch screen keyboard.

Crazy he had pretty much perfected the tech of typing out text on a smartphone and then decided to throw it all away by moving to all-screen devices instead. A virtual keyboard with no tactile feel will never compare until we can have screens that can recreate the tactile bumps of a physical keyboard.

Comment by darth_avocado 1 hour ago

Apple autocorrect has gotten actually worse over the last decade. Before it used to be duck instead of a similar sounding word and it took one action to correct it. Now it’s just fuschia and it takes 5 mins to correct the correction to the autocorrect.

Comment by tartoran 57 minutes ago

I agree with this sentiment. It was so annoying that I turned auto correct off. I found that writing on iPhone has got worse as well, or at least it's my own observation. On the other hand, voice dictation has improved quite a bit that I can just dictate into my phone when needed. For more serious work I use a work device not a consumption one.

Comment by wahnfrieden 1 hour ago

that already made the news. it will be powered by gemini and may launch before next wwdc.

Comment by 2 hours ago

Comment by robinsoncrusue 1 hour ago

[flagged]

Comment by tiffanyh 1 hour ago

The full quote:

> enable devices to interpret whispered speech and enhance audio in noisy environments.

I personally see a lot of people using Siri on speakerphone in public places and am amazed due to the background noise … that Siri can even capture half of what’s said.

Comment by null_deref 1 hour ago

Why did your comment omit the American company that thought it’s a good idea to buy it? Do you think it implies something about all American companies?

Comment by blastro 1 hour ago

unreal