Artificial intelligence company Siri has struck a deal with natural-language question answering platform True Knowledge to power direct questioning in its upcoming “next-generation personal assistant” app for iPhone.

Cambridge-based True Knowledge’s semantic technologies are built on an information repository (rather than documents and web pages), sourced from subject matter experts and combined with machine automation – so it’s a bit more like Metaweb than Powerset. According to the founders:

True Knowledge’s technology is non statistical, meaning that it knows when it cannot understand the user’s question or provide an answer. This it allows it to complement existing search technologies producing its direct answers when it can and other results such as standard internet search results when it cannot.

Using True Knowledge’s API, Siri will be able to answer natural-language queries like a real assistant might be able to, whether it’s a request for the local time in Panama or a bit of sports trivia.