WHILE IT’S NOT perfect now, speech recognition has come in leaps and bounds over the past few years.

Companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft have put resources into this as they put develop their own personal assistant services like Siri, Google Now and Cortana.

Now Facebook looks like it’s getting in on the act as well with the purchase of Wit.ai for an undisclosed fee.

The 18-month old startup allows users to communicate with apps and devices by creating a speech interface for it, similar to how Siri works.

The service has more than 6,000 developers using it and powering hundreds of apps and devices.

Wit.ai Wit.ai

In a blog post announcing the move, the team said that the acquisition would help it accelerate growth and hinted that it would be incorporated into Facebook’s main product.

It is an incredible acceleration in the execution of our vision. 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.

Despite being acquired by Facebook, the Wit.ai platform will remain open to all developers to use with their own services.

Facebook hasn’t revealed details of the deal, but released a statement saying it was “excited to have them on board.”

Wit.ai has built an incredible yet simple natural language processing API that has helped developers turn speech and text into actionable data. We’re excited to have them on board.

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg increased its efforts into artificial intelligence last year by opening up a research lab dedicated to it.

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