From the controversial acquiring of Oculus Rift to the whopping $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp, Facebook has made both interesting and surprising moves over the last year.
Recently, they have made another purchase that hints at possible features to come.
Although details of pricing have not been specified, Facebook has definitely bought the rights to Wit.ai, a speech recognition software. According to Mashable, Wit.ai was founded in 2013 with the intention of helping developers with building voice interfaces for wearable devices, mobile apps, and the Internet of Things. (Cue the excited music)
Seeing as how voice recognition has become more crucial to the technical world, Facebook likely views this purchase as their way of staying in the race against Apple’s Siri and Google’s voice recognition tool, among others. While Facebook has not specified how they intend to use Wit.ai, it has been rumored that they have been heavily recruiting for their Language Technology Group to work on voice-to-text input capability for the Facebook Messenger.
From a recent blog post, it looks like Wit.ai is jumping for joy at this acquisition:
It is an incredible acceleration in the execution of our vision. Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step. Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone and build amazing experiences for the over 1.3 billion people on the platform – technology that understands natural language is a big part of that, and we think we can help.
The platform will remain open and become entirely free for everyone. Developers are the life of our project and the energy, enthusiasm and passion of the community has helped turn what was once just a lofty dream, into a reality.
Who would have thought that Facebook would fulfill the fairy godmother role for Wit.ai?
Particularly in the last year, wearable devices have definitely become more available for everyday use, and are no longer just for spies in the Bond franchise or agents in the Mission: Impossible films. For such gadgets, it is definitely preferable to speak out a command than use the tip of your pinky finger to painstakingly punch out a message.
It seems very likely that some new features with voice commands are in the making for the social media giant. While nothing is concrete, don’t cancel your orders of popcorn just yet: a Facebook vs. Siri smackdown is still a possibility.
Source: Tech 2