alt Hacker NewsApple buys Israeli startup Q.ai
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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...
“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...
Sounds pretty invasive for privacy, if this was ever paired with smart glasses in public.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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 ..
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.
> 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!