Apple faces another suit over Siri technology
A Wyoming-based company has sued Apple for the second time this year | Tech company alleges Siri violates its patent covering voice recognition tech | Suit targets Apple’s flagship products including iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros.
Apple has been hit with a lawsuit alleging that it has infringed a patent related to the tech giant's voice recognition technology, known as Siri.
Powered by artificial intelligence, the digital assistant is a significant part of Apple’s ecosystem.
Siri provides a comprehensive list of voice commands that can be used to control various functions on the company's best-selling products, including its iPhones and iPads, as well as desktop or laptop computers such as MacBook Pros.
More than 500 million electronic devices worldwide feature Siri and almost 98% of smartphone users reported that they have tried using Siri at least once in their lifetime, according to data from Yaguara in March 2024.
Wyoming Technology Licensing filed its second suit this year targeting Apple’s Siri at the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, yesterday, April 2.
The patent in dispute is US patent number 8,521,766 which generally covers methods and systems for information discovery and retrieval.
It outlines a system featuring a processor module capable of receiving information requests from consumer devices via a communications network, decoding these requests, discovering relevant information based on the decoded requests, preparing instructions for accessing information—and then communicating these instructions back to the consumer device.
This allows the consumer device to retrieve and present the desired information using the provided instructions.
Wyoming has owned and held priority over the patent since November 2008.
The complaint highlighted that current speech recognition systems are limited and unreliable, and the ‘766 patent addresses shortcomings in existing technology.
Wyoming accuses Apple of knowingly infringing the patent by manufacturing, using, importing, selling, or providing products that are covered by the claims of the patent.
Wyoming first targets Apple
This is not the first action Wyoming has taken against Apple to protect its voice recognition technology.
In February this year, Wyoming filed a lawsuit against tech giant Apple accusing the company of infringing upon the '766 patent.
The complaint alleged that Apple's products, particularly Siri, violate the patented technology through its iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Pros products.
Wyoming sought various forms of relief, including damages resulting from Apple's infringement, injunctive relief to prevent further infringement, and recovery of attorney fees and costs.
However, Wyoming submitted its motion to dismiss this case in March 2024, which was approved in April—a day before Wyoming filed its most recent lawsuit against Apple.
This latest suit comes as Apple faces a slew of challenges: the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant in March for giving its own products advantages that it deprived rivals of having. The move follows a series of actions brought against the company by regulators on four continents.
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