Apple is not ignoring the challenge to Siri, once one of the iPhone’s key differentiators. First Google Now boasted a richer artificial intelligence engine to support the virtual assistant functions, and now Microsoft has launched Cortana, which some early reviewers believe has leapfrogged both rivals, giving Windows Phone some real firepower at last. Aware of the importance of these voice activated digital assistant apps, Apple has acquired a company called Novauris to strengthen its own offering. Novauris is a speech recognition firm founded by researchers and R&D executives from Dragon Systems, the veteran of this space with its DragonDictate product. It was founded in 2002 to develop automatic speech recognition for mobile devices and apps, and holds various patents in…