After much investigation it appears as though Amazon is looking to go head to head with Apple’s new Siri technology found on the iPhone 4S. How do we know this? Elementary my dear Watson. According to the folks over at All Things D, Amazon has yet to return calls for comment, but it looks as though Amazon has recently purchased Charlotte based Yap, a popular voice recognition software. Earlier today reports of the acquisition came to light on a Charlotte-based blog, CLT. They added up all the pieces after an SEC filing revealing that as of Sept 8th, Yap was now owned by Yarmuth Dion. Who? In any event, it was later discovered that the company’s address was none other than Amazon’s Seattle based headquarters.
After that, the cat was pretty much out of the bag. It was obvious that Amazon was gearing up to compete with Siri, the voice-controlled assistant found in the latest iPhone, the iPhone 4S. In addition, Sprint was utilizing Yap’s servers to house their software which allowed voice mails to be transcribed. And Yap even had its own iPhone application as well. On Oct 20th, the Yap voice mail service was discontinued. It’s amazing when you consider the direction the original start-up was going for and where they ended up. Initially, brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov began a venture four years ago to eagerly build technology that would allow users to utilize voice recognition on Web based applications. They’ve even raised a whopping $10 million dollars at a TechCrunch40 event back in 2007. Pretty impressive and determined if you ask me. In “those days” wireless networking wasn’t what it is today. They weren’t nearly as fast, not everyone owned a “smartphone”, and app stores were pretty much non-existent. And as we all know today, it’s a completely different game now. With virtually all of those problems gone, the nearly 50-employee organization is refocusing their efforts on prior passions as they now work for one of the largest online companies in the world.
The folks over at All Things D offer what they think the new Yap functionality will allow us to do or say:
We can hear it now:
– “Yap, what are this season’s most popular boots?”
– “Yap, buy me the first Harry Potter novel.”
– “Yap, what’s the new hit song from Justin Bieber?”
[via All Things D]