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Die-hard Facebook fans have a lot to look for in the coming months. Global social networking giant Facebook has revealed that it has acquired Mobile technologies, a Pittsburgh based speech recognition and machine translation startup that had developed the app Jibbigo. Facebook is expected to make better use of the technology to enhance voice based search options to translated news feed posts.
Facebook’s Tom Stocky, Director- Product management, who was recently poached from google, wrote in a facebook post, “I'm excited to announce that we've agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, a company with an amazing team that's behind some of the world's leading speech recognition and machine translation technology.”
In simple terms, this means that facebook could provide an option to update your status updates through voice rather than only text as it is done presently.
According to techcrunch.com, Facebook could do big things with this new technology in the future. This ranges from cross-language chat, voice translation for facebook users on the move or help it take news feed posts written in one language and display them in another. Facebook may also offer voice graph search which would compliment its existing efforts to make its presence felt in the search engine arena.
Tom Stocky also wrote, “Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution.”
The latest acquisition by Facebook acquires significance even as voice is fast becoming a important tool in social media networking. WhatsApp has already introduced voice messages for users across platforms that will allow users to send recorded messages to their contacts.
Mobile technologies launched Jibbigo in 2009, and allows you to select from over 25 languages, record a voice snippet in that language or type in some text, and then get a translation displayed on screen and read aloud to you in a language of your choosing.
