Facebook Acquires Voice Recognition Company Wit.ai

The announcement was just made that Facebook acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai is an innovative company that already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps, and it will be interesting to see how Facebook utilizes its expertise.

One big question that arises from the news of this acquisition is: will Facebook users soon be able to post status updates and send messages via Wit.ai? It’s not yet clear what plans the social media company has at this point, but with more and more people employing voice recognition technology when going online through their smartphones, it’s likely that this will soon be the case. Additionally, the technology may also help Facebook in targeting ads as it can track what people are posting via speech.

“It is an incredible acceleration in the execution of our vision,” wrote Wit.ai on its blog announcement of the acquisition. “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 blog announcement continues by explaining that Wit.ai’s platform will remain open and free, which makes it appear that Facebook wants to use the technology to draw developers into its Build-Grow-Monetize loop, where they get help in building apps, but must eventually pay Facebook for ads to grow or monetize by splitting revenue with Facebook from hosting its ads.

Now that it’s part of Facebook, Wit.ai could assist the company with offering voice control development tools alongside its Parse development platform. Additionally, Wit.ai could potentially help with voice-to-text input for Messenger, improve Facebook’s grasp of the semantic meaning of voice, and create a Facebook app that users can navigate through speech.

“Wit.ai has built an incredible yet simple natural language processing API that has helped developers turn speech and text into actionable data,” explained Facebook. “We’re excited to have them onboard.”

Both Google and Apple have their own voice command systems that can be used to transcribe text, however, both are designed to understand rote voice commands for actions such as search. Perhaps Facebook will focus instead on being able to interpret the inflection and colloquialisms that humans use when talking to each other. The usage of wearable devices is growing, and due to the fact that the screens are often too small to type on, the importance of voice command for third-party apps is likely to increase greatly in the future.

With engineering, recruiting and distribution help from Facebook, Wit.ai may grow to become the standard way that third-party developers add voice control to their apps in the future.