Facebook’s New AI Acquisition Could Give Its Messenger App Siri-Like Powers

Getty Images

Facebook is buying Wit.ai, a small Palo Alto, California startup that lets software developers add like Siri-like voice recognition and natural language processing to their products.

On the surface, it seems like a bit of an oddball acquisition. Wit.ai is used by more than 6,000 software developers, most of whom don’t have that much to do with Facebook. This guy used it to build voice-activated Christmas tree lights; these guys to soup up a microwave. But according to a source familiar with the deal, the Wit team’s language processing smarts will give a big boost to one of Facebook’s most important projects: Messenger, the instant-messaging app it spun off from its main social network app last year.

Whatever the case, the acquisition is part of wider effort to mimic Apple’s Siri voice recognition with a wide range of other devices and apps. Most notably, Google and Microsoft are developing their own voice recognition systems for Android and Windows phones.

Facebook isn’t saying much about the deal. The company wouldn’t confirm that Messenger is absorbing Wit.ai, and it confined its comments to a statement it emailed to the press. “Wit.ai has built an incredible yet simple natural language processing API that has helped developers turn speech and text into actionable data,” the statement reads. “We’re excited to have them onboard.”

But the social network could use this type of technology to build a Messenger that can better understand what’s in your messages and suggest further actions to you—much like Google’s Gmail recognizes potential calendar entries, says Tanay Tandon, the founder of a Clipped, a language-processing startup. He interned last summer at Wit. Further on, Facebook might even use Wit’s nascent voice recognition technology to help Messenger convert audio to text or even respond to voice commands.

In a blog post announcing the deal, Wit said it has no plans to kill off its developer platform. “Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step,” the startup wrote.

That’s good news for Ilan Abehassera, the CEO of smart-device startup Insensi, and an early investor in Wit. Wit lets his developers add language processing services without having to be experts—and that’s pretty valuable. “The Siri-as-a-service product doesn’t exit outside of Wit,” he says. “It’s especially interesting for connected devices and the internet of things.”

The main goal here may be to improve Messenger, but the acquisition could also benefit another Facebook technology called Parse, which simplifies app development for mobile developers. “It might be a nice add-on to the Parse software development kit to add natural language processing and voice processing capabilities,” Tandon says.