Dark clouds seem to be lurking over Apple's bright future. Recently, a Taiwan-based university has launched a lawsuit against Apple's know-it-all voice-operated assistant -Siri. Per Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University, the iPhone service- Siri - infringes its patents, which were granted to it in 2007 and 2010, respectively.

According to Reuters, the lawsuit was filed on Friday (July 27) in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The University has alleged that the two speech-recognition patents are used in Siri and avers that it owns the two U.S. patents for the technology, which lets Siri translate voice commands into notes and text.

The lawsuit covers all Apple products that use Siri, which means that it is presently limited to iPhone 4S. The National Cheng Kung University is yet to declare the details of the damages. The National Cheng Kung University made it clear that the damages would continue increasing as long as Siri was being used. It must be noted that Apple had acquired Siri in 2010.

Now, the National Cheng Kung University is seeking compensation for the damages, which it says-would be calculated on the basis of US sales of Siri-enabled devices including iPhone 4S and other upcoming ones.

Additionally, the National Cheng Kung University is also looking into whether the voice recognition technology from Microsoft and Google may have also infringed its patents.

Yama Chen, legal manager of National Cheng Kung University said "We filed that lawsuit in the Texas court because it processes faster and its rulings are usually in favor of patent owners and the compensations are usually higher."

Per the reports from Patently Apple, "the first patent in question was filed in October 2005 and awarded in April 2010 and covers a method and system for matching speech data. The second covers a speech recognition system and was filed in December 2002 and awarded in September 2007. Siri was introduced in October 2011."

Apple seems to have landed itself in hot water. After the legal spat with Samsung, it seems to be dogged by patent infringement. Earlier this month, reports of a Chinese entity - Zhizhen Network - Technology suing Apple for its patent on IM messaging chat bot ran amok. Irrespective of the outcome of the legal battles, one thing's for certain - the lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank.