14 DAY TRIAL // A court from Beijing has decided that Apple Inc. does not have a reason to dismiss a claim that Siri infringes a Chinese patent, Reuters reports. The opposing company can now take Apple to court and ask for property rights.
Zhizhen Internet Technology, a company from Shanghai, China has accused Apple of ripping some of their technologies regarding speech recognition. Apple defended itself saying that they were not aware of those patents while working on Siri and took the matter to the court asking for invalidation of the patents.
After almost a year, the Chinese court dismissed Apple's request so now Zhizhen Internet Technology can pursue its case.
"Unfortunately, we were not aware of Zhizhen's patent before we introduced Siri (speech recognition technology) and we do not believe we are using this patent," said a Beijing-based Apple spokeswoman in an emailed statement to Reuters.
"While a separate court considers this question, we remain open to reasonable discussions with Zhizhen," the spokeswoman said.
Siri is described as an intelligent personal assistant and comes preinstalled with iOS on iPhone 4 or later, iPad mini and the third generation iPad. The app supports ten languages and Mandarin and Cantonese are among those. With iOS 8, Siri will be improved even more and will be integrated with 3rd party apps.