Facebook acquiert Wit.ai, startup financée par Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Alven Capital
Facebook acquiert Wit.ai, startup financée par Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Alven Capital
Jan 7, 2015
Jan 7, 2015
Facebook today acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago (...)
Techcrunch.com Posted Jan 5, 2015 by Josh Constine
Facebook today acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps.
Wit.ai’s platform will remain open and free, which makes it seem that Facebook wants to use the technology to draw developers into its Build-Grow-Monetize loop where they get help building apps, but eventually pay Facebook for ads to grow or monetize by splitting revenue with Facebook from hosting its ads.
As part of Facebook, Wit.ai could help the company offer voice control development tools alongside its Parse development platform, aid with voice-to-text input for Messenger, improve Facebook’s understanding of the semantic meaning of voice, and create a Facebook app you 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,” Facebook tells me. “We’re excited to have them onboard.”
The Wit.ai product lets developers add a few lines of its code to instantly build in speech recognition and voice control. Without it, developers would need the expertise, time and resources to build a whole voice-recognition system themselves.
“Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step,” Wit.ai wrote in a blog post about the acquisition. “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.” Wit.ai’s co-founder Alexandre Lebrun previously sold his “Siri for enterprise” voice command virtual assistant startup VirtuOz to Nuance. He then brought Wit.ai through Y Combinator in Winter 2014 class, where TechCrunch named it one of the top 8 startups from its class. Wit.ai went on to raise a $3 million seed round in October from Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and Alven Capital.
Facebook today acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago (...)
Techcrunch.com Posted Jan 5, 2015 by Josh Constine
Facebook today acquired Wit.ai, a Y Combinator startup founded 18 months ago to create an API for building voice-activated interfaces. Wit.ai already has 6,000 developers on its platform who have built hundreds of apps.
Wit.ai’s platform will remain open and free, which makes it seem that Facebook wants to use the technology to draw developers into its Build-Grow-Monetize loop where they get help building apps, but eventually pay Facebook for ads to grow or monetize by splitting revenue with Facebook from hosting its ads.
As part of Facebook, Wit.ai could help the company offer voice control development tools alongside its Parse development platform, aid with voice-to-text input for Messenger, improve Facebook’s understanding of the semantic meaning of voice, and create a Facebook app you 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,” Facebook tells me. “We’re excited to have them onboard.”
The Wit.ai product lets developers add a few lines of its code to instantly build in speech recognition and voice control. Without it, developers would need the expertise, time and resources to build a whole voice-recognition system themselves.
“Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step,” Wit.ai wrote in a blog post about the acquisition. “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.” Wit.ai’s co-founder Alexandre Lebrun previously sold his “Siri for enterprise” voice command virtual assistant startup VirtuOz to Nuance. He then brought Wit.ai through Y Combinator in Winter 2014 class, where TechCrunch named it one of the top 8 startups from its class. Wit.ai went on to raise a $3 million seed round in October from Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates and Alven Capital.