Facebook has acquired speech recognition start-up for building internet of things. Wit.ai lets software developers add voice recognition and natural language processing to their products.
The financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Wit.ai specializes in API that lets developers add voice command ability to apps, wearable devices, home automation devices, and robots. It can process both voice commands and text-based communication like texts or chats. The start-up will remain open following the acquisition and will will also be free to developers.
“For a long time I’ve been obsessed with building machines that understand human languages. 18 months ago, we started Wit.ai with the vision that no solution is to be found in a closed, centralized, managed approach. We’ve been building an open, distributed, community-based platform that makes it easy for developers to build apps that users can talk to.”
posted Wit.ai in a company blog post.
At the moment it is not clear how will Facebook use this acquisition however one of the possibilities of using the speech recognition software could be on Facebook’s Messenger.