Google has finally closed the deal on Wavii, a natural language processing startup, for a price that is more than $30 million, TechCrunch reported today.
It is known that both Apple and Google were competing for Wavii and finally Google has won. Apple wanted the company, which developed its own aggregation technology and natural summarization algorithms, for its Siri division. The 25-person-strong team, including founder Adrian Aoun, will be moving down from Seattle to join Google’s Knowledge Graph division.
It was previously reported by Business Insider that the two were in acquisition talks, a definitive agreement has now been signed after the Apple/Google bidding war.
Wavii can be a good fit for Google Now. But Wavii’s semantic search knowledge is also a valid addition to Google Knowledge, as it could further contextualize the information Google currently shows on the sidebar of most searches. But their NLP and disambiguation tech could also widely be applicable across many Google platforms, including Google News and Google Glass.
Source: TechCrunch
