Apple buys “Silent Speech” AI startup for $2B, because talking is so 2025

Apple confirmed this week that it has acquired Israeli AI startup Q.ai in a deal valued at close to $2 billion, making it one of the company’s largest acquisitions ever, second only to the $3 billion purchase of Beats in 2014. 

But check your assumptions: this isn’t Beats 2.0. There’s no new headphone brand to flex. Instead, Apple is paying top dollar for tech that might let your devices understand you without you ever saying a word.

​​These days we put our phones on silent so they won’t disturb us; soon the phone will put us on silent so it can understand us.

Q.ai has been operating in secrecy since its founding in 2022. Its machine-learning research focuses on interpreting “silent speech”, detecting imperceptible facial micro-movements, and subtle audio cues to infer what someone means to say.

Patents suggest this ...