Sunday 18 January 2015

Facebook Buys Voice Recognition Start-Up Wit.ai



Wit
Facebook has recently announced that it had successfully acquired Wit.ai which a speech recognition and natural language processing service. The social media giant in last few years has acquired some of the essential start ups and highly performing tech companies both in order to eliminate the competition and to boost its resources and revenue. Acquiring the Wit.ai would help Facebook in developing various related features on its platform as well as it gives Facebook an opportunity to invest in new products.

What is Wit.ai? 

Wit.ai was founded by Alex Lebrun, Laurent Landowski and Willy Blandin in 2013 with a goal of building as service which would bring revolution in the wearable technological products. This start up mainly worked to make it easier and simpler for the developers to build voice interfaces for multiple numbers of gadgets and devices. It streamlined the voice interfaces for the mobile applications, wearable devices and the website which offer voice support for improved functionality. Interestingly Wit.ai had raised $3 million in October with funding round led by the venture capital firm Andreeseen Horowitz.

Wit.ai appeared to be extremely delighted and enthusiastic about the takeover by the Facebook. They see this acquisition as an incredible acceleration in the execution of their vision. They believe with Facebook unlimited resources and with their great talent they could create a new revolution. Wit.ai team had maintained that the platform will remain open and eventually it will become completely free for everyone.

How Facebook Will Benefit From This Acquisition

The buying of Wit.ai by Facebook suggests an indication towards reaching out to the consumers on almost every kind of gadget they might be using. Nowadays consumers use a wide variety of device to get connected to internet which ranges from traditional computers, tablets to smartphones. Wit.ai simply makes the much needed software which can understand spoken words and written text in splendid fashion. And it is already being used by hundreds of apps and devices at the moment.

Using this feature of Wit.ai Facebook is expected to make its website much more accessible from all kinds of gadgets. Facebook users would also get the ability to speak commands that could be converted as texts as posts or messages. It will help in increasing it wider penetration among the masses as well as it will be bringing in cosy revenue. This technology offers various implementation, advantages and usages; Facebook would certainly keep surprising its users in upcoming year.

The Future Prospects and Returns For Facebook

Facebook has announced its deal in the ongoing International Computer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where tech companies are showing off their upcoming devices. Facebook rivals mainly the ‘Big Three’ Apple Inc., Microsoft Inc and Google Inc already have an integrated voice recognition technology in to their mobile operating systems for mobile.

Facebook clearly understands that voice recognition would play a vital role in mainstream adoption of the internet connected devices and the wearable technological devices. Buying Wit.ai just keeps Facebook step ahead of its competitors.

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