Contact: Scott Denne
Virtual assistants, bots and conversational software interfaces are sending the world’s largest tech companies hunting for natural-language-processing (NLP) technologies and expertise. Google is the latest to make a kill with its acquisition of API.AI, which provides developers with access to NLP capabilities. With the purchase, Google could benefit from API.AI’s developer network, giving the search giant access to a significant number of bots, applications and devices already using speech recognition and NLP technologies.
However, multiple redundancies are the most striking feature of this deal – Google already offers developer tools for NLP and speech recognition, as well as its own conversational assistant in its recently launched Allo messaging app and its Google Home smart speaker. Those redundancies highlight the demand for NLP expertise as the acquisition of API.AI will expand Google’s team of experts working on conversational interfaces.
Google’s move comes just three months after Microsoft’s pickup of API.AI rival Wand Labs as the enterprise giant seeks to transform the functionality of its products with NLP, machine learning and data. IBM, Facebook, Google and Amazon have all inked previous NLP transactions and we anticipate continued interest in other independent NLP platform providers such as Recast.AI, init.ai and msg.ai, as well as bot-building platform specialists that include an NLP component. Both categories of vendors bring expertise and cater to developers, which is an important element to growing out diverse sets of training data to tune NLP algorithms.
Subscribers to 451 Research’s Market Insight Service will have access to a full report on Google’s API.AI buy later today. Meanwhile, click here to view a previous Spotlight on developer platforms for chat bots and NLP.
Notable NLP acquisitions
|
Source: 451 Research’s M&A KnowledgeBase
For more real-time information on tech M&A, follow us on Twitter @451TechMnA.