Apple acqui-hired the team from messaging assistant Init.ai to work on Siri

Earlier this week, a small startup called Init.ai announced that it soon would be discontinuing its service -- a smart assistant for customer representatives to parse and get better insights from their interactions with users, as well as automate some of the interactions -- because the team was (according to a notice on the site) "joining a project that touches the lives of countless people across the world." TechCrunch has now learned what that project is: the team is joining Apple. They are becoming a part of the group working on Siri, Apple's own personal assistant that uses voice-based commands and natural language to answer questions, control your phone and more. To be clear, this is not a straight acquisition, but more of an acqui-hire, so Apple didn't have a comment to offer along the lines of the one it made last week. Specifically, I understand there is no IP coming over and (typical of Apple) no specific indication of what part of Init's code or services will be used by Apple, if any.