Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has revealed its acquisition of startup company API.AI. The company claims that the acquisition of the startup will allow the company to create smarter bots that are easier to talk to.
The acquisition was appealing to Alphabet because the startup has the right tools for natural language understanding and speech recognition. Alphabet revealed the acquisition though it did not reveal the terms of the acquisition deal. The company also didn’t reveal how it would integrate API.AI’s technology.
“API.AI has a proven track record for helping developers design, build and continuously improve their conversational interfaces,” stated Scott Huffman, vice president of engineering at Google.
Huffman pointed out that more than 60,000 developers use API.AI to create conventional experiences for different environments such as Kik and the Facebook Messenger from Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB). The VP also noted that the startup offers one of the best user interface platforms and this will help Alphabet to empower developers.
“Joining Google will allow us to accelerate improvements to the platform and service our growing developer community in ways we’ve always dreamed,” claims Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO of API.AI.
The startup’s CEO stated that his company will benefit from Google’s infrastructure, knowledge and support to come up with the best developments and technologies in machine learning and AI. A few months ago, Alphabet launched a new Google Cloud Natural Language API that lets users reveal the meaning and structure of a text. The company also has an upcoming messaging app known as Allo that understands natural language.
API also has a lot to offer once it becomes part of Google. The startup is versatile as far as language is concerned with support for 15 languages including German, English, French and Chinese. It also has more than 3 million API requests according to a counter on its home page.
Alphabet stock closed the latest trading session at $128.65, down by $0.42 or 0.33% from the previous trading session. The stock had a trading volume of 14.96 million shares.
