Reported by Bloomberg, Apple has acquired Vilynx Inc., a startup specializing in artificial intelligence and computer vision technology that enables video to become searchable. The Cupertino, California-based technology giant acquired Barcelona-based Vilynx Inc. earlier this year, according to people familiar with the deal. Vilynx developed technology that uses AI to analyze a video's visual, audio and text content to understand what the video shows. It used that technology to create tags for the video, making it searchable. According to the report, Apple acquired the company for around $50 million.

Apple earlier this year acquired artificial intelligence startup Vilynx with the aim of improving the Siri voice assistant built into Apple devices, reports Bloomberg. The Vilynx website is now defunct, but the company described itself as "AI for media," and it developed tools to help media companies compete against Netflix and other major media giants. Vilynx had a tool that catalogued raw video to make it searchable, providing metadata for video, text, and images. It processed video and then provided relevant content tags. The service also generated rich, motion previews of content offerings, and provided search tools for surfacing content across videos, articles, and images.

Apple Inc. acquired artificial intelligence and vision startup Vilynx Inc. earlier this year for $50 million, according to a report from Bloomberg. An exact date on the deal is unknown but the Vilynx website was last recorded by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on July 16. The company's LinkedIn page has been removed, but key employees, including co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Juan Carlos Riveiro and Vice President Phil Zepeda, are still listed in LinkedIn as working at the company. As with most of its acquisitions, Apple has neither denied nor confirmed the report, instead offering its stock standard reply: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." Founded in 2011 with offices in Spain and Palo Alto, California, Vilynx offered a "powerful AI Brain" that was designed to connect people with content that is relevant to them.

Apple added to its rapidly growing artificial intelligence portfolio earlier this year by acquiring Spain-based AI video startup Vilynx for approximately $50 million, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. Vilynx, headquartered in Barcelona, built software that leverages computer vision to analyze a video's visual, text, and audio content with the goal of "understanding" what's in the video, which helps it categorize and tag metadata, generate automated video previews, and recommend related content, according to an earlier version of its website. Apple told Bloomberg that it "buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," but the company could potentially use Vilynx's technology to help improve a variety of apps. Siri, search, Photos, and other apps that rely on Apple being able to accurately organize and surface information are possible candidates, as are Apple TV, Music, News, and other apps that use recommendation engines to present users with related content. CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly talked up the potential of augmented reality as well, which could also make use of AI-based tools like Vilynx.

Add another AI startup to Apple's growing list of 2020 acquisitions. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the company bought a firm called Vilynx earlier this year. The startup had been training an AI that could understand the content of a video by looking at its visual, audio and text cues. Vilynx used the capabilities of its technology to create tags that made videos more searchable. Apple reportedly paid 50 million to acquire the startup.

Some tech CEOs run the show but don't really understand the nuts and bolts of the company's product. Riveiro is the CEO of Vilynx (pronounced "VEE-links"), a firm which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to help media companies make video "smarter." To date, the Spanish company has received about $15 million in funding from European and North American venture capital and angel investors. Vilynx has offices in Barcelona, Palo Alto and New York City. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Abstract: We present an online multilingual system for event detection and comprehension from media feeds. The system retrieves information from news sites, aggregates them into events (event detection), and summarizes them by extracting semantic labels of its most relevant entities (event representation) in order to answer the journalism Ws: who, what, when and where. The generated events populate VLX-Stories -an event ontology- transforming unstructured text data to a structured knowledge base representation. Our system exploits an external entity Knowledge Graph (VKG) to help populate VLX-Stories. At the same time, this external knowledge graph can also be extended with a Dynamic Entity Linking (DEL) module, which detects emerging entities (EE) on unstructured data.

Vilynx is working with the largest media and publisher companies in the US and Europe to drive their growth and change the way the data is being understood. We are developing leading edge AI and Machine Learning technologies that help drive customer engagement and brand loyalty. You would be joining a young team with of some of the top talent in areas like machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, natural language processing and analytics. We are building a rocking front-end team, capable of doing such things like a single plugin that modifies the DOM of thousands of pages, and brokes nothing, working with the latest stable technologies such ES6 and Typescript. We are looking for people capable of pushing his own limits, that fears nothing and embrace the unknown.

Why This Matters: While TV companies tout navigation, Silicon Valley giants are using AI, personalization to draw viewers to OTT. Leave it to a reporter to find a good navigation tool. Former CBS News and CNN executive Jon Klein believes the TV business needs artificial intelligence to compete with the digital giants whose streaming and over-the-top video offering are accumulating viewers and revenues. Klein is worth listening to. At CNN, he was an early adopter of social media as a newsgathering tool.

Here at Vilynx we're always looking to empower our customers by providing them tools that will help them make a big impact on their KPIs in the most efficient way. We're happy to announce that we just launched a brand new feature called Trending Stories. Trending Stories accompanies, and expands on, our existing Trending Topics feature. It uses Machine Learning to help streamline the editorial process by providing access to a real time stream of breaking news. As we crawl numerous news sites and social media, our deep learning algorithms are able to break through the chaos and identify topics which are being talked about and are gaining momentum.