(Bloomberg) — Facebook Inc. is acquiring Wit.ai, a developer of speech-recognition software, as the social- networking service seeks to expand its artificial-intelligence technology.
The 18-month-old startup’s tools power hundreds of applications to detect spoken words. Facebook didn’t disclose terms of the purchase, which Wit.ai announced on its blog today. Wit.ai raised $3 million in October from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners, SV Angel, New Enterprise Associates, A-Grade, Eric Hahn, Alven Capital and TenOneTen.
Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg stepped up investment and research into artificial intelligence last year, after opening a lab and hiring Yann LeCun from New York University to lead the effort. The Menlo Park, California-based company is aiming to better understand the content and sentiment of its users’ posts, including photo, video and audio.
Wit.ai, based in Palo Alto, California, makes an artificial-intelligence system that lets developers add voice recognition to programs. In recent tests conducted by Chinese Web-search provider Baidu Inc., Wit.ai’s speech recognition was found to be more accurate than cutting-edge systems from Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp., and came close to systems developed by Baidu and Google Inc.
“Wit.ai has built an incredible yet simple natural language processing API that has helped developers turn speech and text into actionable data,” Facebook said in a statement. “We’re excited to have them on board.”
Speech recognition has become a hot area for companies developing artificial-intelligence technology.
“Up until a year ago speech recognition was a very expensive technology,” Tim Tuttle, CEO of speech-recognition AI startup Expect Labs, said in an interview last month. “That’s changed dramatically.”
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