Yahoo continues its shopping spree with the latest acquisition of SkyPhrase, a natural language processing company, to add voice support to its search engine.
Putting all its resources into use and acquiring related technologies and firms is pushing Yahoo further towards its goal of achieving the top position in the market. In the latest move, Yahoo has confirmed SkyPhrase acquisition, which will help it in achieving control over natural language processing technology. The financial details of the deal remain undisclosed but SkyPhrase's expertise in NLP technology gives reasonable hints of Yahoo's plans.
Yahoo announced the acquisition Monday, in the company's blog post, but was sketchy about the details. It did confirm that the SkyPhrase team will move in to Yahoo's New York office for further research. SkyPhrase also confirmed the deal, providing a few more details but nothing on the business aspects.
"We are excited to join Yahoo Labs to continue to work on our shared vision of making computers deeply understand people's natural language and intentions," SkyPhrase said. "We can't wait to take things to the next level together."
The rapid growth in technology calls for more comfort and ease of using a product or service. While Google and Apple have long offered their voice assistance through Google Voice and Siri, respectively, Yahoo's move to integrate a similar feature across its wide array of services doesn't come as a surprise. Google pushed the support for its Voice software to popular Chrome browser last week, which allows users to run voice search.
Yahoo is likely to take advantage of SkyPhrase expertise in NLP technology to add voice support to its search engine soon enough. This will prove Yahoo's undying efforts to take the biggest search engine title from dominant Google.
SkyPhrase joins a long growing list of Yahoo acquisitions, which includes ad-service, URL shortening company, Bread, from earlier in October.
