Apple buys Turi machine-learning startup for a reported $200m

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Apple has reportedly bought a Seattle-based machine-learning startup as part of its continued investment in artificial intelligence.

The quiet deal, first reported by Geekwire, is said to be worth around $200m (£153m).

Turi, which uses the tagline “create intelligence”, let developers and data scientists incorporate machine learning and artificial intelligence into their apps.

Its tools are mostly using machine learning to help companies to understand data such as sentiment analysis on social media or customer segmentation.

Apple’s purchase of Turi is a further proof the company is ready to put more resources into artificial intelligence.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, talked about longer term opportunities including the potential he sees in artificial intelligence earlier this month on Apple’s earnings conference call.

“We have focused our AI efforts on the features that best enhance the customer experience,” Mr Cook said.

“We're also using machine learning in many other ways across our products and services, including recommending songs, apps, and news,” he added.

Last year, Apple also bought VocalIQ, a UK based artificial intelligence-powered company that aims to make robots easier to speak to and could lead to improvements in its voice assistant, Siri.

The company has been aggressively hiring experts including those from other companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook, in addition to the VoicaIlQ acquisition.

Apple is also facing competition from Google and Facebook which have already announced greater focus on their artificial intelligence products this year.

While Google is improving its Google Now software, Facebook is introducing intelligent “bots” to its Messenger service that can understand requests and questions from users.

Apple declined to say how much it paid for Turi but confirmed the deal.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” the company said in a statement.