In a move destined to accelerate adoption and development of “Intelligent Assistance,” Facebook has acquired wit.ai, a small venture whose “open” approach to natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning has attracted over 6,000 developers to its fold. While accounts are free and the level of commitment and activity probably follows the typical Pareto (80/20) distribution, there is no doubt that wit.ai can prove to be the proving ground for voice-based, conversational command and control of each individual’s ever-growing interaction with digital devices and domains.

wit.ai was founded less than two years ago by Alex Lebrun and Willy Blandin. In 2002, LeBrun  founded Intelligent Assistant specialist VirtuOZ. He originated several patents based on understanding and “predicting intent” and pioneered the use of NLP to deal with imperfections in the “grammars” or databases used to support understanding. In January 2013, Nuance acquired VirtuOZ and integrated it – as Nina Web – into its intelligent customer care service offering.

Blandin is a hacker-extraordinaire whose LinkedIn profile characterizes his areas of expertise as  “Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing systems” and “Highly-available infrastructures based on open-source technologies.” Together they built a team that built a platform to grow the base of app developers looking for a simple and inexpensive way to add a natural interface (preferably spoken) to their offerings.

Lebrun demonstrated wit.ai at Opus Research’s headquarters a couple of months ago. It is simple to use and fast to learn. He made it clear that he was keeping it “free” and “open” in order to maximize the amount of raw material that the NLP “engine” was processing. Based on experience, he well knows that the quality of understanding and the ability to respond correctly improves dramatically as the volume of queries grows that customer feedback is absorbed.

Enter Facebook. With 1.35 billion “active users” and an unfathomable amount of conversations, messages and postings available, the prospects for wit.ai to improve its ability to recognize meaning and predict intent is staggering. Needless to say, Google has been showing off its ability to understand spoken intent with “OK Google” and had been collecting utterances (in the form of directory assistance queries) and search terms (based on search box input) for more than a decade. Microsoft Bing, via Tellme and voice search, has a fairly large database of its own.

With the wit.ai acquisition, Facebook becomes a more formidable player in the Intent Economy. There is also an “acqui-hire” aspect to the deal in that Lebrun and Blandin bring their high levels of energy and commitment to the “open” approach to IA development. It is a stark contrast to the super locked down, closed approach exemplified by Apple (we’ll never see a Siri API, will we?), Google or Microsoft/Bing, to date.

Quoting the wit.ai blog post from earlier today: “The platform will remain open and become entirely free for everyone. Developers are the life of our project and the energy, enthusiasm and passion of the community has helped turn what was once just a lofty dream, into a reality. We want to continue to build with you.”

That says it all.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Facebook, Artificial Intelligence, Mergers and Acquisitions, Natural language processing, Intelligent Assistance