It looks as though Amazon have plans to take on Apple’s Siri voice recognition assistant with a product of their own, after a recent discovery that the company bought out Yap.
Yap is a smaller company who are behind an app called Yap Voicemail, which some have said has the potential to take on the likes of Vlingo, Google Voice and other voice control assistant-type apps.
By acquiring Yap, Amazon will take on a company and its employees who have already built a successful voice control engine with voice recognition software. From here, Amazon could choose to bake the technology into any one of its products, with the potential for Vlingo or Siri-like functionality.
Amazon seems to have kept the whole deal on the hush, and the news of Yap’s acquisition is only just seeping onto the web. Amazon’s buying only became apparent recently when the new address filed for Yap’s HQ was indeed inside a larger building, owned by Amazon.
We’ve had a good think about what Amazon could want a voice recognition company for, and our best bet is on their new tablet device, the Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire is Android-based, but Amazon has shown that they wants to do things their way, with the user interface changed completely from stock Android and plenty of Amazon’s services preloaded.
Perhaps Amazon will also implement the service into its web streaming services for TV shows and Movies, so that users will be able to speak commands such as “play”, “pause or “skip” to their PC or laptop.
What do you think Amazon could be plotting with their new voice recognition technologies?
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