Why is Facebook acquiring Wit.ai important I hear you ask?
Well, Wit.ai allows developers to build applications and devices that you can talk to. It effectively turns your voice commands into actions.
Whilst Facebook has not revealed what they plan to develop using Wit.ai some speculate that Facebook could use Wit.ai to develop its own voice products or implement the technology into its existing services. This could allow users to simply talk to their devices to post comments, images, videos etc without physically touching it.
One area of Facebook’s service they are supposedly going to utilise the technology is in their messenger service. This would allow it to transcribe your speech to text and let you command it to then send the message.
In a statement, Wit.ai said “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.”
Overall Wit.ai will remain free for developers to use. It will be interesting to see how developers and Facebook choose to implement the technology, but whatever they do it is likely to change the way we interact with our devices.